Running Dry
by greenwool
Summary: "Her boots are dusty instead of muddy on the first day of June, and she has an acute sense of impending danger." Fire ravages District Twelve, and Katniss loses one of the last pieces of her father that she has left- his bow. Stretched to the ends of her own endurance, just how much is she willing to sacrifice to keep herself and those she loves alive?
1. Fire

_**i.**_

* * *

There had been rumblings for weeks that it could happen. It had happened before; fire took Twelve almost sixty years ago, when it had been so hot and dry you had to wet your kerchief and hold it over your mouth as you walked through the streets to keep the dust out of your throat. Only Greasy Sae had been there for it, she was by far the oldest living resident of Twelve. No one was sure how old she really was and she wasn't keen on divulging that information, but not a soul doubted she knew what she was talking about when she smacked her thin lips and said conspiratorially: "Its an accident waiting to happen, is what it is."

As though they weren't talking about the very place they all lived. She shook her head as she said it, long pieces of her wiry hair falling in her face, her steely eyes watering with rheum. "And it'll start in the Seam, you mark my words girl." Katniss doesn't doubt it- all the homes in their corner of Twelve are made of wood and crumbling horse hair plaster. They're living in a tinderbox, and all it would take is a drought and a careless spark to make it an inferno.

Midway through a rainless May, Sae clucks her tongue and shoots a glance at Katniss as she clunks a bowl of cold rabbit stew in front of her. Katniss tucks in to her food, but its no longer hunger that's gnawing at her stomach. It's fear. When Gale tugs playfully at the end of her braid and asks her what's wrong, she frowns and doesn't answer.

Her boots are dusty instead of muddy on the first day of June, and she has an acute sense of impending danger. She's jumpier in school, snaps at Prim and Madge when they try to soothe her nerves, and stops doing her class work entirely. Of all people, she even snaps at poor Delly Cartwright, who had the distinct misfortune of catching her when she almost tripped over a stone on the path outside of school because she was too busy devising ways to extend their dwindling water ration.

If Gale notices her irritation, he doesn't comment, and it's not long before his nerves are on edge as well. Food in the forest dries up and dies. The lake recedes and one afternoon she and Gale find at least fifty fish gasping in the pungent mud the lake leaves behind. They bag as many as they can and trip over themselves to get back home, simultaneously amazed at their luck and deeply perturbed at the state of the lake. They sell only twenty of the fish to Ripper, trade a few with the baker, and then Hazel teaches them to salt and dry the rest.

It's lucky they do, because soon afterward there's little point in going back into the woods. There's nothing left to forage or hunt. She and Gale make one last trip loaded down with as many white liquor bottles as they can scavenge in Haymitch Abernathy's trash and fill them up with what remains of the lake. The water is dark with sediment, a sickly amber that makes her slightly queasy. They carry the water home anyway and try to clean it by passing it through layers of muslin rags and boiling it for hours. It's still not clear, but it'll have to do.

She brings an extra bottle of water to school with her everyday, watchful of fair little Prim, for whom the intense heat and sunlight is nearly unbearable. Her cheeks burn a hot red, even during the night, and Katniss sneaks out of class to bring her water throughout the day.

She watches the rest of the fair Merchant children fading away as well. One afternoon, she meets Peeta Mellark's glassy, fevered eyes across the airless classroom. He is staring openly at her, examining her an intensity that is at once strange, and quickens her blood in a way she's never felt before. When she locks gazes with him, his cheeks burn impossibly dark, and his eyes flit down to his desk, where his hand drags a pencil smoothly over its surface. He isn't writing though, she can tell by the way his arm is moving from the shoulder and not the wrist. What he was doing she couldn't guess, but maybe with the suffocating heat, he wasn't quite right in the head.

She wonders if he has sun sickness, like Prim. She wonders if his mother manages their water ration, and how generous she is with her sons. She wonders if Merchant families have bigger water rations than Seam families- and if not, how they manage with five people in their family, and among them three large sons, when her own tiny family is so close to the brink.

The bell rings and she rushes to the door, intent on finding Prim. In the congestion of bodies by the door, someone knocks into her- a brush of heated, sweat soaked skin against her own- throwing her into the person next to her. She whirls around to find Peeta's blue eyes wide with shock.

"Sorry," he says quickly. "Sorry- I'm sorry!"

She recoils instantly, startled by the wildness in her veins as her heart beats thunderously against her chest. The crush of bodies around her becomes suffocating, and she barrels her way through, suddenly desperate to be outside. She flees down the hall the moment she is able to, but she feels the weight of his stare all the way home.

Though her strange reaction towards the Mellark boy distracts her with a whole new kind of anxiety, it doesn't dispel the old one entirely. Sae turns to her that afternoon and shakes her head. "Any day now," she says, and Katniss' entire body runs cold with dread despite the dry heat in the airless Hob.

Soon after that the dust comes, rising like a cloud of smoke and settling heavily over Twelve.

It was creeping its way into the houses in June, and by July's end it had found its way into the cabinets and dressers. All the plates had to be wrapped in rags (if you had rags to spare) immediately after washing, or the washing would never end. And they have little enough water in their rations for washing as it is. Glasses were turned upside down on shelves, clothes hung over the backs of chairs, and the creases and corners of the shotgun homes in the Seam had to be stuffed with wet clumps of paper, or else you'd spend all night choking on the air. To this very end she destroys her school books, laughing as she crumples the final page of her history text.

"Panem today, Panem tomorrow, Panem forever," she intones mockingly.

She and Gale laugh humorlessly as she tells him this, and together they destroy his Language workbook and soak the pages in Hazel's dirty washing water, the grayish suds collecting at their elbows.

"Any day now," Sae reiterates, a week later when she stops by to trade, as though Katniss has forgotten her warning. She rolls her eyes, but it does nothing to stop the dread that gnaws in the pit of her stomach.

And Sae is right. The fire starts late the next afternoon, in the dusty haze of twilight after a bitterly thirsty day. Incredibly, though, it starts in the Merchant quarter. No one is quite sure exactly which home sparked the blaze, but most agree it came from somewhere around the butcher shop, which is the further east into town from the Seam. It's a small blessing- had it been any closer to the Seam, there would have been so many more lives lost.

Katniss is at least a mile away into the parched stillness of the forest, desperately scavenging for something, anything, to eat for that night, when she first smells the smoke, and her blood roars in her veins. She flies back through the trees, heels thudding against the bed of dried pine needles that cover the forest floor.

All she can think of is Prim in her worn cotton shift dress, home alone and entirely at the mercy of fate. She knows something of fate, and it is cruel in Twelve, particularly to young girls. She thinks of Prim peeling the last of their wild carrots at the kitchen table, right where she left her, as fire rips through the dry grass in their yard, terrifying Lady into leaping their fence and bounding away. Prim, with the house burning down all around her, calling to her as she is swallowed by flames. But when she clears the gate it becomes obvious that the fire is raging further east, and Prim is safe- for the moment.

Katniss bursts through her front door to find her sister shocked and trembling, a bag full of their belongings thrown over her shoulder. Her bottom lip quivers and her eyes are swimming with unshed tears.

She grabs her sister and pulls her close, swallowing thickly as she feels the younger girl quake in her arms.

"Katniss," Prim sobs "Mom's gone."

She pulls back, a black rage building in her gut.

"She left you?," she asks.

Prim nods and cries harder.

"She heard that the bakery was on fire and she just-"

Prim hiccups and swallows hard.

"-she just took off. I don't know where she was going, she didn't say anything at all and-"

"Prim. Listen to me, we'll go to the Hawthornes and you stay with them. Listen to Gale, do whatever he says. Do you understand?"

"Katniss, don't leave, don't go-"

"I have to get Mom."

She pulls upright and grabs Prim's hand, leading the girl towards the door. Outside, the sky is hazy with smoke and people run in panicked zig-zags around them. The Merchant quarter might be on fire now, but there was no telling if the flames would jump over into the Seam. And once they did, everything around them would be an inferno. She spies Gale on his front porch before they're even close. His face is drawn and tight, and he too has a bag of possessions slung over his shoulder. Posy stands tucked under his arm, her dark eyes wide with fear. Rory and Vick sit a few feet away, pale as sheets and clutching small bags of their own.

"Katniss, what-"

"No time. Can you take Prim?"

"Yes, of course. Where is your mo-?"

"She ran to town, I don't know why," she says, cutting him off quickly. "I have to go get her."

She doesn't say it and neither does Gale, but they both know that if her mother is injured or killed, she and Prim will be sent to a group home. They'd narrowly avoided this fate a few times already. Gale shoots her a panicked look and grabs Prim.

"Go Katniss," he says. "Be careful."

She turns and flies toward town, her bow and arrows bouncing in the bag slung across her shoulder. If she is seen with them she could be whipped, but she doubts very much that anyone will notice or care, given the disaster currently unfolding. All the same, she can't help the cold fear she feels when she realizes she is running plain as day through the center of Twelve with her very illegal weapon. It is absurdly reckless, but she doesn't have time to stop.

Doesn't have time to think, or breathe-

She runs headlong through streets choked with soot and smoke, which burn her throat and sting her eyes. Covering her mouth with her sleeve, she staggers forward, only removing the fabric to scream for her mother. Buildings roar with fire all around her and moan heavily in the fading sunlight as their support beams are consumed by flames. There's a deep groan and sudden crash as a house a mere few yards behind her collapses, sending a cloud of embers and black smoke into the street and high into the sky.

Panic makes her blood run cold, and a new layer of sweat prickles her skin. Though she's covered most of the Merchant Quarter, she cannot find her mother. People with soot streaked faces and their mouths and noses covered in cloth rush by her, and she whips her head around to try to catch a glimpse of them, but her mother is nowhere among them.

Hopelessness seizes her. Her calls reverberate into the thunderous inferno without answer, and she knows the longer she searches, the less chance she has of finding her.

It seems more than likely that some merchant home has become her mother's funeral pyre- perhaps it was even the bakery, as Prim suggested. She selfishly hopes against hope that at least Peeta made it out of the blaze unscathed...

That she should want that more than she hopes for her own mother shocks her, and she realizes with dawning horror that she had resigned herself to her mother's death long ago, but is not ready to let go of the boy with the bread. She has not yet found the strength to thank him. Has not found the words she needs to tell him how he saved her, how he gave more than just burnt bread, how he-

Timbers snap like gunshots beside her as another house collapses; this time just feet away. She wheels around, ready to flee, but the smoke and embers engulf her before she can take a single step. Her arm falls away from her face to brace her body as she falls, and the baked air fills her mouth and lungs. It burns so horribly she is gasping in soundless pain as she hits the earth. Her head cracks against the stone pavement and she is momentarily dazed.

The world around her- the flames, the black soot in the super-heated air, the choking gusts of smoke- slow to an incomprehensible stillness. She feels light and aimless, like ash, like she too could float away on the rising winds, her clothes just an alien weight devised to keep her earth-bound. Silence engulfs her as the scene around her grows unfamiliar.

Someone is shaking her. Their lips are moving quickly and soundlessly. Darkness pricks her vision.

"Katniss what are you doing?!"

Her mind says this in another voice. A familiar voice, but not her own. Or maybe she is hearing this. Is she hearing this?

"Don't just lie there- get up! You have to run!"

"Ok," she mumbles, and her eyes slide shut.

* * *

It was a concussion that took her, and no one will tell her how she escapes with her life. Even sweet Prim, loyal to a fault, keeps her lips tightly sealed. Katniss doesn't like mysteries, and she likes this one even less. Gale is of the same mind as she is, unsurprisingly. His jaw clenches angrily anytime its brought up, his hands jerking unsteadily in the middle of whatever task he has them engaged in.

It's incredibly strange- Gale has never hidden his anger around her before, or kept a secret from her. It hurts in a way she couldn't have ever expected, somewhere deep and dark within her, somewhere possessive and jealous. His silence is a betrayal, but she can't decipher how or why she feels this way, just that she does. And strongly. But she doesn't have time to pick this apart, or dwell on the situation for very long. There's too much to do.

With half the district destroyed, including the market, butcher and bakery, and the water supply dwindling to near nothing at all, every day is a desperate race for survival. The Capitol sends building supplies, food and money, but its only for the Merchants and they're not in a particularly neighborly mood.

Her mother's body is never found.

Katniss won't waste a solitary drop of moisture on her, let alone a tear, but she holds Prim close as she weeps into the night. She couldn't begrudge her resilient little sister a single comfort, especially now that they've lost everything but one another. They pass the days in shocked silence in the Hawthorne's cramped but cozy home. Hazel and Gale both insist on it, and though Katniss doesn't want to admit it, they're right to.

Following her accident, something isn't quite right with her. Her head stays wrapped tightly in bandages, her temple a bruised, bloody mess, and though she feels physically strong, after a few hours of activity a pressurized heat gathers in the front of her head that makes her dizzy and nauseous. Focusing her eyes for long periods of time is difficult, and if she's out in the sun or heat for too long it lands her back with that same strange ache in her head.

No one will say anything about it, but Gale, who now watches her with a deep intensity, tells her shortly that with her mother gone, there is no one left in all of Twelve who can help her. It's true.

And if she were to die, that would leave Prim all alone.

So there's nothing anyone could say, really. Nothing at all could be said. Except…

"Gale," she croaks one afternoon as they sit alone in his kitchen, "Don't let her starve, if I- if I-"

But even she can't say it. Can't make her lips form the words she knows could be true very soon. Gale mercifully cuts her off.

"You won't."

She nods numbly. There are words Gale hasn't said, but he doesn't need to. They stand between them like an unspoken pact.

You can't.

Their twin eyes meet, smoke and steel, in the heady darkness of his unlit kitchen and the shadowy, jealous part of her quakes with a fevered happiness. She and Gale- they belong to each other. They are sibling kits, with clever eyes, and steady silent gaits- twin predators in the dead silence of the forest. Two parts of the same whole. Whatever it was that souls were made of, Gale's and her's were the same.

She reaches her hand across the table to grab his, which is rough and dry and so large. These hands are her hands, they belong to her just as much as they are his. Mindlessly, their fingers twist together and Gale's breath, calm and steady, ghosts against her face.

"You won't," Gale says again. "I swear it."

Its a fruitless thing to promise, of course. And silly, even, for Gale to defy death, when it seemed to be coming for her day by day. His hand tightens around hers, though, and she lets herself believe that she believes him. It eases the sense of danger that hasn't really left her since Greasy Sae first told her the story of the fire that wiped Twelve clear off the map sixty years ago.

That night, her dream is a strange menagerie of shadowy, faceless figures set in a blazing purgatory… and Peeta Mellark's inquisitive blue gaze is trained on her, only her, as though she was the only thing in the world that existed. His mouth moves soundlessly, and she tries to memorize the forms his lips take, tries to decipher what it is that he is saying, but everything around her turns to smoke.

She awakens with a start, breathing as though she's been running for hours, her head pounding with the strange burning pain that has by now become a familiar specter in her life. A low moan escapes her throat, lost on the slumbering occupants of the Hawthorne home.

One name sits on the tip of her tongue, and she can't bear to ask the question. If Peeta did not survive the fire, she does not want to know. She is afraid to think of what it would do to her, if she came to know he was dead. Her eyes slide shut again, and she slips gratefully into a heavy sleep with her next breath.

The next morning, nearly two weeks after the fire, she and Gale rise with the sun to hunt. They lope easily out of the house and down streets still coated in ash and dust, their matching gait punctuating the silence with light taps of boot against stone.

The first drop lands against the top of her head, and she's sure she's imagined it. But when a second falls, right on the tip of her nose, she turns in shock to Gale just as the sky above them opens up.

Gale starts to laugh- its a deep, throaty sound- and the moment is so absurd that she does as well. Alone in the dead of early morning, and soaked completely through their clothes, they stand laughing in the middle of the burned out remains of the Merchant-Seam divide, watching ash and dust turn to streams of mud before their very eyes.

He scoops her up, tugs her against his chest and holds her close. She opens her mouth and tilts her face upward, toward the sky, and heavy droplets plop on her face, into her mouth and trickle up her nose. It's sweet and cold, and she swallows and chokes all at once, trying not to spit it back out. Trying not to waste a single precious drop. Gale follows her lead, and they're pressed together, ridiculous grins plastered on their faces, collecting rain in their mouths like they're children.

He sets her down and she twirls, her arms wide, and lets the rain soak through her hair and clothes, washing the sweat and ash from her body onto the street below.

Feeling the weight of a gaze upon her, she stops, mid-twirl, and stares into the muggy haze. Her breath catches in her chest at the slumped figure standing in the doorway of one of the temporary residence structures built for merchants in the Seam.

Peeta survived after all.

* * *

_A/N: I want to give a HUGE thank you to my wonderful beta Opaque, without whom I would have never gotten this finished! She's seriously amazing! _

_This story is part of a larger series I am working on I've titled 'Without', inspired by some of the most poisonous flowers in the world. I got the idea from Prompts in Panem about two weeks or so before the whole Flowers of Panem contest started, and it just stuck with me. Check out my profile to find out more about my 'Without' stories. This particular one should run something like 10 chapters. _

_Please take a moment and hit that review button, if you're so inclined, and let me know what you think!_


	2. Hemlock

_**ii.**_

* * *

The problems start when Gale reveals to her that her father's bow was lost in the fire. The words he uses are "never recovered"- as though there is a chance that the bow could still be out there, somewhere, buried in the ashes. As though ambiguous rewordings can dull the pain of losing one of the last pieces of her father she had left. If Gale meant to give her hope, he gravely miscalculated.

Hope is a dangerous thing, and she knows this well. Hope is her mother's lean, crumpled form in front of her bedroom window looking out onto the street below, burning their last candle to wait for a man who hadn't come home in years. Hope is the hunger in Prim's eyes when she returns from the forest, and hope is the hungry shell her sister becomes when she fails to bring anything home. Hope is bright eyes circled in dark swathes of skin, staring eagerly into the bakery window, and fading darker in resignation with every passing day. Katniss does not allow herself hope.

Except deep in that place that existed somewhere in the drowsy darkness between waking and sleep. Here, she thinks of bread: rich and dark, peppered with nuts and raisins, delivered by pale, shaking hands. A nervous smile and downcast eyes. The brush of heated skin against her own. Here, hope is bread- still warm as she swallows it without chewing, tears rolling down her face, and Prim's face too, as they devour it in giddy silence. She has one exception, the only one she will allow herself. Just this one.

"No Gale. Its gone," she says, with stone-faced finality.

He shoots her an aggravated glare and sighs.

"Don't be like that, Catnip. It's somewhere, and when they clear the rubble they'll find it."

"No, they won't. And if they do, you know I can't claim it."

Gale rolls his eyes and tugs her forward.

"Well, bow or no bow, we still have to go out there today."

But Katniss doesn't want to go into the woods. She doesn't want to go anywhere. A vicious hollowness has stolen over her and all she wants is to curl up somewhere alone, somewhere small and quiet, and hide there until the treeline swallows the sun and everything becomes blessedly dark.

Gale's hand around her own is not the comfort it had been just days ago- now its suffocating and demanding. He's pulling her forward through the Seam, farther from the dark hole she aches to find and burrow in. Her stiff legs do their best to keep up, but they feel numb and jolt unpleasantly with every step. She nearly trips over the uneven pavement, and Gale's tight grasp is the only thing that keeps her from tumbling forward.

"Stop, Gale," she says, trying to tug her hand out of his, but he is too strong. He whips his head around and stares at her.

"What?" he says.

"Let me go," she hisses, trying to wrench her hand free. He opens his clenched fist in surprise, and her wrist throbs unpleasantly.

"What's wrong?" he says, his eyes searching hers.

She doesn't want him to touch her. Her skin crawls when he reaches out to brush his fingers against her cheek. She jerks her head back, just out of his reach.

"Don't touch me," she snaps.

He swallows roughly, his eyes darkening in anger.

"Fine," he grinds out through clenched teeth. "Then keep up. We're behind."

Though she doesn't want to go anywhere with him, she knows he's right. They have a family of seven to feed and the woods are nearly picked clean of what game survived the drought. If they want their family to eat tonight, they must move.

She follows his stiff form in sullen silence under the fence and through the woods.

"You gather," he says, tossing her the game bag. It knocks against her chest with a hollow flump! just as he as he turns to walk away, his own bow in hand. "I'll hunt."

She is a better shot and he knows it. He's just punishing her. Glaring heatedly at him as he slips into the darkness of the woods, she begins her search.

It quickly becomes apparent that whatever they do manage to bring home tonight will not be enough. She has picked over this section of the woods before, and nothing much remains. Desperation drives her to clear the area of what little is left: raspberry leaves to dry for tea, a few tiny green garlic bulbs, and some wilting pokeweed.

With the hope that another area will have more to gather, she pads towards the lake, her bag's hollow knock against her back echoing in her ears. Focused intently on her task, she doesn't notice how intense her thirst is until her throat refuses to swallow without catching. She coughs and her fingers slip into her pocket to reach for her bottle. She greedily finishes off what's left, but that doesn't quench her thirst. The pressure in her head is back, and its building rapidly as her eyes unfocus and the ground tilts below her feet. Though the dappled forest light flashes dizzyingly around her, she forces herself to move forward.

'Find one more thing,' she thinks. 'And then you can rest.'

Where its light, its too light. Where the shadows lie, its too dark to make out anything. She fumbles through the brush, hands running over the tops of plants. If there was any game in the area before, there certainly won't be now. It doesn't matter, though, because she can barely stand, let alone give chase.

She sways where she stands, suddenly and disconcertingly too far from the ground to keep herself upright.

Where is she? Has she ever been to this part of the forest before?

'One more thing. Almost done.'

A brush of tiny, white flowers against her fingers catches her eye and her heart soars. It's Queen Anne's Lace, whose roots are hearty and sweet like carrots, if a little sour. They'll do well enough.

She greedily digs out the root as the ache in her head throbs viciously. A strange shimmer dances at the edge of her vision, like water reflecting off a pool, and though she whips her head to find it, she knows that its not real.

'Almost…'

The bulbs are difficult to tug free, especially with her fingers moving so feebly against the soil, but she pushes forward. Her nails scrape a root, pulling some of the flesh of the bulb back with them.

'Almost, almost, al-'

"KATNISS!," Gale cries, startlingly her. She drops the roots and turns around to face him. His face is horrified.

"What?," she barks, the word slurring slightly.

"What are you doing? That's water hemlock!"

Is it?

She looks down at her fingers still knuckle deep in the soil.

Its the last thing she remembers.

* * *

Running. Something scraping against her legs. Hands on her face. Something bright shining in her eye.

Prim, talking in a hushed but steady voice.

Then nothing.

* * *

Seizure.

The word tastes woody and stiff, like 'Sorry' or 'Don't', when it spits out of her mouth. She'd seen them before, when miners with head wounds came to her mother. Foaming mouths, bloody tongues, or vacant blank eyes.

At first she doesn't know where she is, and it takes both Prim and Gale to convince her that she has been hurt, and yes, she has to lie down. When the world starts to right itself, she is startled to find a coppery taste in her mouth. And then she smells it on her breath- old blood.

It's then that she resigns herself. Gale refuses to let her come back to the woods with him, and she doesn't even try to argue.

A hollowness takes root in her chest and doesn't leave.

Prim brushes her hair gently, changes the bandage that crosses her skull with nimble fingers, and talks through her boorish silence with a lilting tone. It eats her alive.

She takes up washing with Hazel. It's not enough.

The food on the table dwindles. She takes less for herself.

She tries to sign on to a construction team and Rory drags her back kicking and screaming at Gale's request. She is inconsolable, and tears into Gale with a maliciousness she knows is mostly directed at herself. His eyes burn darkly as he shoves her down on her cot.

"Don't be an idiot, Katniss," he sneers. It hurts so bad that for once it is Prim who has to hold her as she cries.

The one thing that brightens her listless mood is that no one has come looking for she and sister to put them in the group home. Maybe with the reconstruction in full swing, nobody has time to check in on the Everdeen girls. Or maybe the fire left enough orphans that they couldn't take more if they wanted to.

Weeks pass. She and Gale take out tesserae every opportunity they get, grimly lugging home the tasteless grain in resolute silence. Her headaches come less frequently when she drinks water, limits her time in the sun, and sleeps well. She tries to do that, more for Prim than for herself. An uneasy equilibrium is reached. They have even less than they did before, but they're surviving. Each day they live is more than they could hope for.

The merchant quarter is rebuilt in record time, and by September's end very little is left to do. School starts right on schedule. The four Hawthorne siblings and the Everdeen sisters trudge forward on the first day of school with threadbare pants and hollow stomachs.

She notices right away that Peeta Mellark is not there. He does not come the next day, or the next. On Friday Madge Undersee turns to her during lunch and asks her if she knows anything about where he was.

Her brow knits together forcefully.

"How should I know?" she hisses. Madge blinks owlishly and says nothing in return.

"I've never even spoken to him."

Madge opens up her sandwich and picks the cheese out, eating it slowly. She doesn't meet Katniss' heated glare.

"And anyway, its not like I keep up with Merchant gossip."

Katniss spits out 'merchant' like a cuss, and Madge flinches at this and stands abruptly, her food still spread out on the table.

"Eat it," the girl whispers, her voice trembling. "I don't want anymore." She stands and then flees the lunchroom, without turning back once. Katniss isn't hungry anymore, but wasted food is so abhorrent to her, especially now, that she carefully repacks the food and dumps it in her own lunch pail.

Rumors abound about Peeta. He seems to be all anyone can talk about, besides from the fire. The stories she hears range from fantastical to credible, but there's one aspect that is consistent, one part that seems to be a known fact: he is the only Mellark left.

Her stomach twists horribly whenever she thinks of him now, so she tries her best not to. Tries her best to box him up and pack him away. She tries to wash his name away in cloudy suds of laundry water, or lose it in the bleary jumble of words of her course work by candlelight.

It is no use, though, none at all, because the harder she tries to forget him, the more he burns himself into her mind. The desolate slump of his posture, sagging weakly against the wall, dogs her every step. He's a ghost- following her through school, the washing with Hazel, and even through homework with Prim, and so she truly means it that night when she says "I'm not hungry" to a table full of starving people. Prim looks at her skeptically and raises a palm to her forehead.

"You're a little warm, Katniss. You feel ok?"

"No," she says weakly, surprised to find that she's telling the truth. She is anything but ok. "I need to lie down."

Gale frowns slightly.

"We'll save you something," he murmurs.

"No. Please don't," she says. "I don't want to waste it. My stomach-" She presses a palm against her taught belly. "-I don't think I'll keep it down."

Gale nods, his heavy gaze softening as he looks at her.

"I'll be in to check on you soon," he says, worry evident in his tone.

She fairly collapses on her stiff cot, her eyes sliding shut immediately. Hot tears ease out from under her lids and splash over the bridge of her nose onto the sheets below. If Gale does come to check on her, she misses it. She's asleep before the wetness on her face has dried.

* * *

The next morning she wakes early to Gale and Hazel murmuring softly in the kitchen. The thud of mugs against the table and the light clink of metal against bowls veil their words, but she hears enough to piece together what they are saying. They're talking about her.

'... Prim said once isn't enough to worry about...,' Gale utters. Hazel sighs something in response.

'...we'll have to see. More than once could be serious…'

Their hushed conversation conjures memories of a past life with two parents and an infant sister. A life in a green forest with her tall Papa, and his strong bow. A life without fire and drought and headaches. She lets herself dream of it, and hopes she will not remember any of it when she finally wakes up.

Losing it once had been hard enough.

* * *

A big big big thank you to my wonderful Beta Opaque!

Coming up next time on 'Running Dry':

"The scent that greets her makes her knees buckle, and she grips the side of a counter to keep herself upright. There's butter, fresh bread, vanilla, brown sugar and cinnamon, and a thousand other things that are at once warm and so sweet. She bites her lip to quell the whimper that threatens to escape from her, but she can't stop the roll and growl of her stomach that echoes brazenly against the shining new bakery equipment.

Peeta smiles and its so pained its nearly a grimace. He moves quickly, fetching her a chair and placing it behind her.

"Here- sit down. You don't look-" he swallows roughly, his eyes landing on her shaking hands. "-you don't look so good."


	3. Investment

_**iii.**_

* * *

The morning of October first brings a squall, in more ways than one. Wind and rain batter the Hawthorne's home, lit dimly with what little oil they can spare for the lamps to get the washing done, while Rory and Gale bellow at each other from across the kitchen. Katniss drops her pounding head against her sisters lap on her cot, while the younger girl gently unwinds her braid and runs her cool, tiny fingers through her hair.

Katniss sighs deeply, pressing her lips together and willing the ache in her head not to get any worse. Her head has been in a doldrum for hours, and finally she can't even keep her eyes open without her stomach turning. Prim checks the wound on her temple, now just a pink flash of healing skin.

Removing her braid helped. Prim's willow bark tea does too. But by late morning the pain is infinitely worse and Prim struggles to help her out the backdoor so she can finally expel the contents of her stomach. The acarid bite of bile lingers in her mouth and nose as rain washes her vomit away in rivulets of mud. Prim stands over her, already soaking in her thin cotton dress, as she rubs her back in slow circles.

"-YOU CAN'T TELL ME WE DON'T NEED IT-"

Rory's voice filters out to them, even through the roar of the wind.

"-TOMORROW. AND YOU CAN'T STOP ME, GALE JACOB HAWTHORNE."

The front door slams and there's a beat of silence before they hear glass shatter against a wall. Prim hugs her tiny body against her back, and their warmth combines in the frigid rain.

She is humming softly a song they both know well.

Her stomach again clenches tightly and her eyes water. Back bowed grotesquely, she whimpers and then heaves. Nothing leaves her but more bile, sticky and yellow, then muddy, then washed away and gone.

Prim hums louder and pets her wet hair back from her forehead, and the words to the song catch in Katniss' mind.

"-here is the place where I love you."

It sticks with her as she dutifully downs the willow bark and chamomile tea Prim prepares for her, reopening the yawning chasm of helplessness that formed within her when Rory told Gale he was taking a tesserae ration that morning, sparking the argument that raged all day.

There was nothing she could do. Nothing she had left. Nothing until the mines, just a year from now for Gale, and three for her.

She falls into a numb sleep by late afternoon to the steady rhythm of rain falling against the window. The storm peters out by nightfall, and once again she skips dinner. Nobody says anything though- it would be cruel to after she had spent most of her day emptying her stomach in the first place.

In the dark quiet of the room she shares with Posy, Prim and Hazel, she runs her fingertips along the bones jutting out of her hips, the dip of her stomach, and the prominence of her ribs. Her tiny breasts sit proudly atop her chest, but they're hardly anything at all. They don't even fill her small palm.

When the house is quiet she steals away into the night.

She understands, finally, the kind of desperation that drives women into the darkness and then to strange beds. It was the shadowed hollows of a starving child's cheeks. The awful gulf of helpless rage that strands you so far from the rest of the world.

Gale had been so kind, and Hazel too, for taking them in. So had Rory and Vick, for sharing without complaint. But Prim was so thin she could fit into eight year old Posy's clothing easily, and no one else was faring much better.

She couldn't let Rory take out a tesserae- not after everything Gale had done to prevent it. She couldn't let that happen.

A year ago, she would have had the means to prevent it. The specter of her father's bow ghosts against her calloused hands, and she fists them in response, digging her blunts nails into the pillowy skin of her palms. That bow had stood between her family and starvation for years.

Now it was gone.

It was useless to imagine a world where her bow was never lost. Useless to think of all the ways she could be using it now. Useless to let herself feel so frustrated and helpless without it.

So she doesn't. She puts one foot in front of the other, and she moves forward.

Its not a decision, and she's not scared. Its just the next logical step, the next part of the progression of her life. Like the first tooth she lost. Like the first time blood trickled down from between her legs, shocking her mother to tears. Like the first tesserae she took out.

She tries to focus on what will come after- the rough press of coins in her hand, the pavement under her boots as she runs home, fresh cold air rushing at her face and biting in her lungs. She thinks of a time maybe two weeks from now, three even, when the memory of this has faded, or she's successfully pushed it so far back inside of her that it's almost gone.

She tries to live in a future where this is just a memory.

Then she thinks of putting the money in Hazel's hands, watching the soft, lined skin around her eyes crinkle in confusion. Maybe Hazel wouldn't ask where it came from. If she did, she will tell her that she stole it. Or maybe she wouldn't say anything at all, just shoot her a look that will damn her own mother and every way that she failed them. Hazel would see it and understand because Hazel would know what she did.

She needs to stop her hands from trembling, to find the stillness in her that clears everything else away but what comes next.

She finds her next breath and pushes it out before she can forget the rhythm of breathing.

Growing up, she and Prim had a toy- it was a wooden barrel with animals whose arms interlocked. You were meant to grab one and pull it up, and count how many more rose with it. 'That's what fear is,' she thinks. 'You see someone rising and without thinking you lock arms with them and feel your feet leave the ground.' That's what she feels now- her arms interlocked with six other people as they are jerked from one tragedy to the next.

And that's how she's here, standing in the line of women standing in the dim lamplight of Cray's newly built house. This is just the next step in a long series of carefully choreographed dances she'll have to be a part of through the rest of her life. This is Twelve, and she is from the Seam. Though Madge might flinch to hear it, this is what the world was for those not lucky enough to be born into the ranks of the Merchant class.

She would take what goodness the world has given her- like Primrose, like Rory, like Vick and Posy- and preserve it where she could, however she could.

The women look everywhere but at each other. They don't talk. But Katniss raises her chin off of her chest and looks straight ahead. When that door opened, she would meet Cray's eyes.

Her palms are sweaty, and she's trembling, but its no longer with fear.

'Only one family will eat tonight, and if it's mine then I'm damning someone else to starve.' A door cracks open and light floods the street, a slant of it falling across her face. 'District 12 is a pen, and all of us in it are pigs,' she thinks. 'We may not get reaped, but we're all a tribute at some point.'

But it's not Cray's door that's opened- its the door of the building across the street. Silhouetted in the blue-white industrial light is someone she knows.

She stares for a moment, shocked into stillness.

'Oh no,' she thinks. 'Not him.'

He stares too, as if he's not sure of what he's seeing.

"Katniss?"

Peeta's voice is soft, but it sounds so loud in the silence of the street that she flinches.

She rips her gaze away and faces forward, eyes trained ahead. He steps forward out of the light- she can hear his footsteps on the cement. Her jaw clenches furiously, and she refuses to look at him.

"Katniss?," he asks again. He steps further into the road and she grinds her teeth.

'Go away,' she thinks. 'Just go away.'

Something strange burns in her veins- its hot and bottomless and makes her hands fist and pricks the skin at the back of her neck. He steps close to her, averting his eyes from the other women on the street.

"Katniss- come away from there," he pleads quietly, his voice crackling. "Please."

She turns and looks into Peeta Mellark's strained face and shakes her head once. He moves even closer still, his hand rising as if to touch her, then falling and twitching uselessly at his side.

"Please," he chokes. "I'll- I'll pay you. I'll give you money. Food. Whatever. Just, please Katniss, come away from there. Please."

She jerks her head up and narrows her eyes at him. One bed is as good as another, she supposes. If said bed belonged to a boy her own age, she should count herself as lucky. She doesn't think about who this boy is- what he did. That will make all of this much more confusing and she's afraid if she thinks too hard about it, she won't be able to do it. And she needs to. Her stomach knots painfully.

'Move,' she thinks. 'Just move.'

So she steps out from the line and follows him through the door and into the back of the new bakery, and she doesn't think about the fact that its the Boy with the Bread that she's following.

The scent that greets her in the bakery makes her knees buckle, and she grips the side of a counter to keep herself upright. There's butter, bread, vanilla, brown sugar, cinnamon and a thousand other things that are at once warm and so sweet. She bites her lip to quell the whimper that threatens to escape from her, but she can't stop the roll and growl of her stomach that echoes brazenly against the shining new bakery equipment.

Peeta smiles and its so pained its nearly a grimace. He moves quickly, fetching her a chair and placing it behind her.

"Here- sit down. You don't look-" he swallows roughly, his eyes landing on her shaking hands, "-you don't look so good."

Why he would bring a chair for a prostitute (Another woody, bitter word) evades her- especially one he considers not "good looking". Perhaps he was hoping to pay her less. Perhaps that was why, out of a line of women with passably pretty faces and full busts, he chose the thinnest.

She collapses on the chair, sinking her spine gratefully against its back, and her legs quake with the remnants of the adrenaline that sponsored her trip from the Seam. Try though she might, she cannot stop the shivers the roll through her, or the tap of her molars against one another that sound loudly in the silent kitchen.

"Wait here," Peeta breathes. "I'll be right back."

He means to do it here then.

Leaning forward, she unlaces her boots and tugs them off, lining them neatly next to her chair. She forces herself to stand on her weak legs and grinds her teeth against the eruption of pain and heat in the front of her head.

'Not now,' she thinks. 'Wait until I am finished, and then you can have me.' She moves to peel her thin dress over her head, but her hands are shaking violently and she ends up just gripping the hem in useless, leaden fists. Her cheeks flame hot and that deep, queasy feeling from before- shame- bubbles viciously within her.

His footsteps thump in the hall. Her eyes dart down.

Small breasts. Loose hair hanging limply over her her shoulders, ending in ragged tails by her hips. Her hands fisted in the fabric of her dress, knuckles white as bone and just as stiff. It inches the dress up her thighs, revealing the very tops of her threadbare black stockings, a black cotton that has faded to murky gray over years of washings. Just a flash of the bare skin of her thighs is visible and still horror floods her like a swelling tide. Light-headed and trembling, she locks her knees and grits her teeth, willing her legs to keep her upright.

When Peeta enters the room, she raises her chin in proud defiance. Just another step forward. She thinks distractedly of Posy's hunger-darkened eyes. Prim's scrawny arms.

Peeta's eyes widen in shock, his face flushes wildly, and he very nearly drops the plate of food in his hands.

He averts his gaze, training it intently on the floor, and draws a singular, ragged breath.

"Katniss, stop."

The words strike her like a blow. He is turning her down. They would starve. Her eyes prick hotly, but she refuses to cry.

Rory.

She can't give up. She tilts her chin back up, trying to catch his evasive eyes.

"You don't have to pay. Food would be fine," she croaks.

"Katniss, don't. I don't want-"

"I have nothing else to trade," she says, her voice cracking. "Just- just this. So, take it, because I can't go home empty handed."

Her vision blurs suddenly as tears build and bead out of her eyes, splashing hot and wet against her cheeks and catching on her chin.

Peeta sets the plate on the table, and throws a blanket she hadn't see him holding earlier over his shoulder. With his eyes resolutely trained on the floor, he grabs her hands and unfurls the fingers clutching the hem of her dress. Wrinkled and sweaty, it falls back down over her stockinged knees.

"I'll give you whatever you need," he says, exhaustion lining his voice. "You're not going to do this."

For the first time since she had seen him leaning against that doorframe, she looks at him. He seems older- ashen and drained, as though someone had leeched the color from him. Though his eyes are wide- 'Is he frightened?'- they are bloodshot and glassy.

"I told you I have nothing else to trade."

Peeta shakes his head, gaze still averted.

"I don't want anything from you."

Pins and needles prick at her fingers and she flexes her hands to relieve the tension.

"Why are you doing this?," she whispers brokenly.

"You know why," he says slowly, quietly, as he wraps the blanket around her shoulders. "You have to know why."

But she doesn't. She has no idea, and the more she tries to make sense of it the more absurd it all seems.

"I don't like secrets, Mellark."

Peeta laughs sadly and shakes his head.

"It's hardly a secret."

"I don't understand- I can't repay you. You can't just give this to me," she says, waving at the food he set down on the counter.

He smirks. She wonders at how the same expression on Gale's face would read as haughty, but on Peeta's its simply boyish self-satisfaction.

"Yes, in fact, I can," he says. "And I'll give you more, too."

Its her turn to stare in shock.

"I can't- You- I don't have anything to trade you," she repeats dumbly. There is a catch here. He is waiting to spring it on her, waiting until she can't refuse. But she already won't refuse him a single thing for that basket of food. In that basket is Prim's life. The lives of Gale and his family. Her own life.

"What if there was something you could trade me, besides-," he glances away and doesn't finish.

"Like what?"

"I need- I need help, here. It's just me, and frankly, it's too much. I need someone I can trust. I could hire you. I'd pay you whatever you needed."

She frowns.

"I can't bake."

"That's ok- you don't have to. I'll bake, and you can clean, and take care of the customers."

"People don't like me."

"You just have a, um, _unique_ kind of charm."

She can't stop the rye grin spreading on her face. If there is one thing she definitely is not, it is charming.

"Come on," he says, with a grin of his own. "It's a fair deal."

That is a lie. The food on the table costs far more than a weeks worth of wages and he knows it.

"No, it's not."

Peeta rubs his neck, flushing. Did he think she didn't realize the value of the food on the table? She made her living calculating values.

"Well, ok. It's not. But, to me it is. Think of this-," he says, gesturing toward the basket of food, "as an investment."

"An investment in what?"

"You," he says simply, but the intonation sends a wild heat through her veins and a shiver down her spine. The movement of his lips shaping the word is like a promise.

She trusts it implicitly.

* * *

Hazel weeps openly when she finds Katniss asleep at the kitchen table that morning- the basket of food nestled next to her head. She knows that Hazel knows how she came to be in the bakery that night, but the older woman stays mercifully silent. A look of understanding passes between the two women, and Katniss is sure she sees something other than knowledge in her eyes- something like sorrow.

And shame.

Just another secret swept deftly under the rug in the Hawthorne home.

For all his bluster, Rory, nearly his brother's height and just as powerfully built, ends up weeping in her arms when he wakens that morning to find their kitchen table laden heavy with rich bakery bread and fruit. _Real fruit._

Gale's bloodshot gaze locks on her as she holds Rory and her stomach lurches in shock. His eyes burn with a strange intensity she'd never seen before, but the meaning behind it escapes her. She searches his tired face and tense body for some kind of clue, anything to tune her in to what was going on in his mind. But he tears his eyes from hers and turns away, hiding his hands in his pockets and effectively closing himself off from her searching gaze.

_She wonders if he knows. _

* * *

_**Hey guys! This was tough to get through, but Im really happy with it, and its all thanks to my wonderful beta Opaque!**_

And thanks to all the wonderful souls who reviewed the last chapter, you guys are phenomenal! As I'm sure you've guessed, we've hit rock bottom, and things are only going to get better from here.

When I get stuck writing, I sometimes get into character by writing a drabble from their point of view. If you're interested in drabbles from the 'Running Dry' universe, you can find them on my tumblr yesscoolverygoodok dot tumblr dot com. Eventually I'm thinking about putting them together as an outtakes chapter at the end, but Ill be posting them as I write them on my tumblr.

**_And now, a sneak preview of Chapter 4:_**

_"I've been reading Mom's books," Prim says softly. "Because we're so low on your tea. One of them said rubbing your head would help." Katniss has to lock her jaw to keep from whimpering in relief when Prim runs her cold fingers through the roots of her hair. It does help, just a little, and Prim keeps going long after Katniss' eyes droop shut._

_"I wish it wasn't this way," Prim says, and she doesn't know how to respond because it is this way, whether or not they like it._

_"Better me than you," she says thickly, and realizes there is something that she hasn't said yet to her sister, but she needs to._

_"I'm sorry Prim. About Mom."_


	4. Twice

_**iv.**_

* * *

_Seizure_.

It happens again the night before she begins her work at the bakery. Blessedly, she is alone. Had anyone else witnessed it, she would have been forced to stay in bed for days.

She can't afford that. None of them can.

As if the situation isn't cruel enough, for a single desperate moment afterward, when she is confused as to how she came to be on the floor, and she thinks she is home. She thinks she hears her mother in the kitchen, and wonders when her father would be home from work. Its the sweetest torture- for just the blink of an eye, the ragged wound left behind by her fathers death is stitched back together.

As the fog in her mind lifts, the need to travel back to that moment is so raw she shoves her palm into her mouth, biting down and keening soundlessly into the flesh. Her throat contracts tightly as she turns on her side and curls up tightly on her cot.

Through the pounding of blood in her head she hears the clatter of dishes echoing from the kitchen, and little Posy's tuneless voice carries through the house. It's like a torch in her darkness, drawing her forward, suffusing her with a sobering mix of surrender and determination. Her mind clears and she breathes as deeply as she can.

'You can't,' she tells herself. 'Get up. Move.'

_'More than once could be serious...', Gale had said._

Well, Gale be damned. What he didn't know wouldn't hurt any of them, and she decides then and there that no one, especially not Prim, ever had to know that it happened twice.

She continues her nightly routine as though nothing is wrong, schooling her face into a blank mask, ignoring her sore muscles. They eat and she is quiet, but not too quiet. She helps Vick with his homework. Washes dishes. Avoids everyone's gaze. By no means is she a great actress, but if anyone notices something is wrong, they don't comment.

It has been a few nights since her midnight trip to the Merchant quarter and Gale has been sullen and distant ever since. Ironically, this is working to her advantage tonight, as he is the only person in the house who can tell immediately when she is lying and he is too busy avoiding her to notice that she is hiding something. Tonight he is moodier than he has been all week- sitting stoney-faced by the fireplace and glaring down at his hands as he whittles arrow shafts out of a squat cedar branch he dragged home.

He pretends not to notice when she slips away early to bed, but she catches his eyes flicker over to her as she leaves the kitchen. Ultimately, its good that she does go to sleep early, because it feels as though she is only asleep for a moment before she is awake and trudging down the winding dirt roads of the Seam toward the paved streets of the Merchant Quarter.

The brisk darkness of early morning eases some of her anxiety- her solitude is as rare as it is precious, and she relishes the opportunity to stretch her legs before most of the District is even awake. When she arrives at the bakery, the back door is flung wide open and light beams out onto the freshly paved walkway. The scent drifting from the kitchen is warm with yeast and vanilla. It's like an invitation, she thinks.

Peeta looks exhausted, but he is waiting for her with twin mugs of steaming black tea set out on the work table, and all manner of ingredients have already been measured out for the day's baking. His smile is gentle and a little crooked.

"Hi," he says, his voice husky. He clears his throat. "Not too early for you, right?"

She shakes her head, but a yawn escapes her anyway. His grin widens and and he nudges the tea across the table toward her.

"Don't worry- you'll get used to it," he says, and begins to combine ingredients in a huge, shining vat, above which hangs what looks a motorized spade. "Drink up- we'll get started when you're done."

She waits until he turns around before she pinches some willowbark out of her pocket and drops it in her tea. It swirls in the steaming liquid lazily, and its woody scent drifts into her nose and her stomach turns unpleasantly. Her head is ok now. How long will that last?

She scowls as she nudges the wood scrapings under the water with quick jabs of her fingers, and is grateful that Peeta is too busy with the giant vat to notice her fiddling with her tea. Her hands are uncomfortably sweaty and she wipes them on her pants.

What would he say if he knew what had happened last night?

What would Gale say? Or Prim?

She nearly chokes on the steaming liquid when her chest tightens so roughly in fear that she swears every ounce of air has left her.

No one can know.

_'Not ever.'_

She clunks her drained mug on the table, and her eyes flicker to Peeta as he turns around to retrieve a bowl of what looks like mealy, speckled flour from the table.

"Done?" he asks.

She nods, a dark wisp of hair falling against her cheek. He watches as she tucks it safely back behind ear.

"Let's get started then."

The bakery is smaller than she had imagined, and every inch of space is packed with air-tight aluminum containers of different grains, flours and spices. The smaller containers are stored on shelves that stretch from floor to ceiling, while larger containers are stored underneath the industrial steel work table in the center of the kitchen. She isn't sure what she was expecting, but it hadn't been this. The kitchen is cold and sterile, and the blue-white buzz of the lighting sets her teeth on edge.

Peeta's friendly smile seems uncanny in contrast. His shirt sleeves are rolled up to his forearms, and as he explains the differences between flours to her, she catches the puckered, pink trails of healing burn scars on the insides of his wrists. As though he sensed her gaze, he tugs his sleeves down without once breaking his train of thought. It's casual and understated, an action that could have been mistaken for habit. Only through repeated practice could he have perfected this gesture.

The rest of her first shift passes in a blur of unfamiliarity and she barely remembers what he tells her about managing the customers and register. As the sun inches over the horizon, the industrial ovens in the next room roar to life. The whir of their fans is loud and pulses slowly as the temperature of the shop rises despite the open doors. Her head spins drowsily.

The beginnings of a headache have blossomed by the end of her shift, and she's relieved when Peeta comes to thank her and tell her that she is free to go and he will see her in the afternoon. Despite the heat, both of his shirt sleeves are pulled over his wrists.

Gale is waiting for her against the back door when she exits the shop, staring blankly at his scuffed boots. He frowns when he sees her, his brow tightening in concern.

"You don't look so good Catnip."

Its the first thing he's said to her all week.

"I'm ok," she says. "Let's go."

She weaves a little unsteadily and Gale moves to grab her arm, but she shrugs him off and pulls away.

"I said I was ok, Gale."

"Fine," he bites out, running a hand through his hair in irritation. "Just- fine."

They walk to school in silence.

* * *

Days pass in a chaotic jumble. As the weather gets colder, her headaches get worse. She hides it as best as she can, but the third week in October brings the first cold snap and the air is so clear that the sun shines brighter than it did all summer, and her headaches increase in frequency until they are near constant. Prim's willowbark stash dwindles. She tries to make do with the Capitol's bland black tea and raspberry leaves, but the Hawthorne household is cramped and, with three growing boys, loud.

Rory and Gale are at each other's throats more often than not. Rory is anxious to get out into the forest, but Gale is not as keen to have him tag along. She has no idea why- with Gale all but physically restraining her from joining him they are down to whatever meat he can drag back on his own. Gale is strong, but he's not strong enough to carry back game for seven people, and still save enough to trade. Katniss' paycheck from the bakery is substantial, and she gets bread to take home besides, so at the very least they're not starving. Still, they can't survive on bread alone.

It's Thursday evening and she has stumbled home, the roar and heat of the ovens, the clamor of pans and the white hot electric lighting from the bakery still buzzing in her mind. Prim notices her lack of balance immediately and tugs her through the door, relieving her of her bag and leading her carefully to her cot. Gently, as though she were handling delicate china, she unknots the cord holding Katniss' braid and untangles the strands of hair.

"I've been reading Mom's books," Prim says softly. "Because we're so low on your tea. One of them said rubbing your head might help."

Katniss has to lock her jaw to keep from whimpering in relief when Prim runs her cold fingers through the roots of her hair. It does help, just a little, and Prim keeps going long after Katniss' eyes droop shut.

"I wish it wasn't this way," Prim says, and she doesn't know how to respond because it is this way, whether or not they like it.

"Better me than you," she answers thickly, and realizes there is something that she hasn't said yet to her sister, but she needs to.

"I'm sorry Prim. About Mom."

"Don't apologize Katniss. I think we may have lost Mom when Dad…"

Prim's fingers pause for a moment, then she sniffles.

"But Katniss, you're the best sister- ever. Really."

Katniss swallows and smiles.

"You too little duck. The best."

A crash from the kitchen startles both of them, and Gale's muted voice, angry and low, drifts in to them.

"They're fighting again," Prim whispers. "They always fight now."

Katniss sighs deeply and rubs her eyes. Sitting up, she twists her hair and pulls it over her shoulder. She smiles weakly at Prim.

"Wait here, ok? I'm going to take care of it."

"Ok," Prim says, and straightens out Katniss' pillow cover nervously.

She treads silently down the hall, pausing in the shadows by the doorway into the kitchen.

Gale is redfaced and frowning fiercely at an equally flustered Rory.

"-talking to Madge Undersee last week!

"Dammit Rory, what have I told you about-"

"If you think whatever you were talking about with her is more important than teaching me how to take care of the family then you're the one who's irrational," Rory sneers. "And you're being ridiculous about this. Katniss won't care! She's as confused as I am as to why you're so damn hard-headed about it!"

"Fine, dammit, fine. You wanna know why? I don't want to watch my baby brother get whipped- thats why. Katniss could take care of herself- she's- she was incredible out there- and because it was my time with her. It was my place, with her. And I just- everything changed after her head- its like-"

"Gale, nothing has changed except you! She's not going to just up and die, she's fine..."

"You didn't see her!" explodes Gale. "You didn't see when it happened! I thought for sure that she was-"

Gale can't continue. He runs a hand over his face and paces like a caged animal.

"And then she went and tried to- she never would have, if it weren't for us-" Gale swallows. Breaths. Opens his mouth.

_He knew._

She steps into the light of the kitchen.

"Take him."

Gale's head snaps in her direction and Rory gapes at her.

"Take him," she repeats, her face blank. "To the woods."

"Katniss I'm not going to-"

Before he can finish, and before she knows what she is doing, she has Gale pinned against the wall with her arm across his throat. Gale is not small by any means- towering well over six feet, he dwarfs her on the best of days. It could only have been total shock that allowed her to get him against the wall. He doesn't move- his dark eyes are watchful but angry and glittering dangerously in the dim lamplight.

"Do it," she snarls through her teeth.

He swallows lightly and she feels the contraction of the muscles in his throat against her arm. When he nods his head, just slightly, she lowers her arm and moves away. As she leaves the kitchen, she looks quickly to Rory, who is pale and looking anxiously between them.

Her eyes narrow at Gale in warning.

She doesn't say anything. She doesn't need to.

_Gale knows a threat when he sees one._

* * *

"That went well," Peeta says with a smirk. They are just closing up and Katniss had predictably failed to make their last customer of the day a happy one. It's not her fault they sold out of whole grain by noon, if the woman wanted it and knew they always sold out early, why did she show up five minutes before they closed? Maybe Katniss should have kept that last thought to herself.

She groans and drops her face in her hands.

"You heard that?" she mumbles through her fingers.

He laughs and shakes his head. His arms are sunk to the elbows in a sink the size of a kitchen table, where baking pans and mixing bowls are stacked precariously and soaking in dishwashing solution. He turns his back to task, but she gets the feeling his attention is still fully trained on her.

"Well don't say I didn't warn you. I'm horrible with people," she says.

He chuckles lightly.

"Hey, be as horrible as you want. Its not like they can go anywhere else. Plus-", He looks over his shoulder at her and she can see his eyes crinkling in laughter, "-she deserved it."

_Peeta is kind of funny._

In spite of how much she hates the suffocating heat and sterility of the bakery, she doesn't mind the work so much when she's around him. Which is good, because working in a bakery isn't easy. It's heavy labor, and the hours are long. She helps him prep and open before dawn, and runs the shop in the afternoon when school is over. More often than not she is past exhausted by the end of the day. How Peeta had managed to run a bakery alone for weeks on end eludes her, especially since what he seems to really enjoy is human interaction, and he had spent most of his time in the bakery alone. It must have been soul-crushing for a boy who had spent so much of his life surrounded by family and friends.

How did he do it?

She discovers, as is often the case with rumors, the truth is far less interesting, and Peeta's story after the fire is no different.

Though Thistle McCullough insisted that he had lost a leg, and Amanda Gulch claimed he was completely covered in burn scars, and James Holmquist told anyone who would listen that Peeta had actually set the fire in the first place, she is not surprised to learn that nearly every rumor she had heard about him had been just that- a rumor.

What is true is that his family is dead, and the Capitol had seen fit to pull him out of school, as he was the last person in Twelve who could operate the enormous industrial machines in the bakery. From sun up to sun down six days a week, it became the sole responsibility of a sixteen year old boy to bake for an entire district.

On a crisp Friday morning nearly two weeks into her work at the bakery, just as the sun was peeking in through the shop window, she sneaks an appraising glance at him and notes with some alarm that she can see bone-deep exhaustion in his glassy stare and sloped shoulders. She wonders if this place has become a prison for him.

"What's wrong?" he asks.

She realizes she has been staring at him just as she notices that the smile doesn't quite reach his eyes, which are darkly shadowed and red rimmed. His skin is pale- even for a Merchant, and especially for the very beginning of Autumn- and a little gray. Why doesn't he talk about his family? She had never even seen him upset. Doesn't he miss them? He must- he must miss his brothers at least. It had been a hard year for everyone, but especially for those who lost someone in the fire.

And Peeta had lost his entire family.

The rising sun coats his face in dusky amber light, highlighting at once the fairness of his thick curls, the dark shadows lining his eyes, and the angled cut of his strong jaw.

She grabs a loaf of bread and shoves it roughly into the case.

"Nothing," she mumbles.

"Then at least I got something right today," he mumbles.

She blinks at him, her lip twitching, and then she laughs. It's Peeta's turn to flush, as though he is just realizing what came out of his mouth. His eyes brighten a little though, the tiredness in his face fades as he grins. As he stands and his shoulders square, she gets the fleeting impression of a quiet strength, something like freezing water rushing under thick ice. He's well-built, but not the way the wiry young men from the Seam are. Not the way Gale is. His arms are thick and sturdy, with just a dusting of white-blond hair, and his hands are broad and powerful. He's not very tall- Gale is easily a foot taller than Peeta is, but that isn't saying much. Gale is taller than nearly everyone, just like his father before him.

Hazel said she could always find Gale's father in a crowd- his was usually the tallest, handsomest head around. Posy laughs when she says this, and asks her how in the world a head could be handsome, but Hazel just winks and says, "I thought every inch of your Papa was handsome- but especially his head."

"You'd better get going," Peeta says, his voice interrupting her thoughts, before turning away from her to grab a tray on the counter. "School starts soon. Don't want you to be late."

She nods mutely and stands, vibrating with an excited, unnameable something. It beats a dreamy cadence in her veins and she feels a little light-headed. It's weird, but not entirely unpleasant, and though she's sure she's felt it before, she can't remember when or why. It must have been so fleeting she that had had no time to dissect or classify it, then promptly forgot it had ever happened in the first place. Tugging her apron off more roughly than usual, she marches to the kitchen to retrieve her bag. As she lifts it, it falls open and the apple she brought as her lunch thumps to the floor and rolls away.

Peeta stoops to pick it up before she can chase it, and that something pulses happily as his fingers close around the pink skin of the fruit.

_Yes- he is a different creature entirely from Gale._

He hands it back to her, and she shoves it roughly in her pack, flushed and irritated.

"Bye," she mumbles, and swings the back door open. To her surprise, she very narrowly avoids whacking a small, dark boy wearing grass-stained pants. He jumps, clearly not expecting the door to open so suddenly.

"Sorry," she breathes. "I didn't know you were there."

The boy avoids her gaze.

"Is Mr. Peeta there?" he asks, his brow furrowed as he gazes at her shoes with his hands tucked into his armpits.

"Yeah, um, hold on."

She turns back to the kitchen and catches Peeta's curious stare, then nods toward the open door with her head.

"Someone here to see you," she says.

"Oh," he says, frowning slightly. "Tell them to come in."

She does, and as she slips out of the bakery and sprints to the school, she forgets about the boy completely. She's distracted by a new and alien warmth taking root in her chest, flickering within her like a secret fire. When she lies down to sleep that night she feels a little empty. A little confused. She can't explain it. She doesn't understand- and every time she tries to pick the feeling apart, to name it or give it some kind of context, it slides through her fingers like she's trying to hold sand in her cupped hands, like she's grabbing at smoke.

October slips by without an answer in a whirlwind of allspice, woodsmoke and musty wool sweaters.

* * *

On the last Sunday left in the month, Gale takes Rory to the woods and they shoot a buck. As they sit in the backyard gutting and quartering it, she grabs a knife and joins them.

Its as good as an apology as Gale will get from her. Rory grins at her though, and he looks so much like Gale did when he was his age that she can't help but grin back. It was a good, clean kill- and more meat than she and Gale could have carried home had she been there instead of Rory. This amount of meat would get them a fair amount of money, and set them up nicely to start stocking for winter.

Katniss can't help but take a little credit for the situation- she had suggested that Rory join Gale in the first place, and on their first trip they had been wildly successful.

"See?" she says to Gale with a self-satisfied smirk. "I was right."

He grunts in response, but knocks his shoulder against hers playfully and his lips turn up slightly. It's hard to stay mad when they have gotten so lucky.

Together they lug the meat to the Hob, smiling and dirty and covered in sticky sweat, her hair clinging to her neck, and Rory's sweatshirt with a wet trail down the back of it.

Their glee is short-lived, because as soon as they step into the Hob, they know something is wrong. Its packed but subdued, people brushing past one another and barely glancing at each other's faces.

Gale frowns.

"They're busy trying to be invisible," he whispers to Rory, loud enough for her to hear, and Katniss isn't sure what he means until she spots a few patrons she's never seen before. They're not from the Seam. They're not even from Twelve. "Undercover peacekeepers," Gale says. "They've been here for awhile now- just watching. People are getting nervous."

Now so is she.

They try to blend in and make their way unobtrusively to Sae's stall, where she buys everything they have and immediately tucks it away under the counter. Usually Sae is one of the bawdier vendors at the Hob, but today she is quiet and reserved. "They think it was someone in the Seam who started the fire," she whispers to her. "To mess with productivity. They think it was rebels, and the Capitol ain't happy, girly. Not one bit. Watch it now, things 'bout to get bad."

Katniss doesn't doubt it for a minute. There are signs of it everywhere. Haymitch Abernathy is surlier than usual, which even she considers quite a feat, considering his usual state. Ripper has shut down her stall, and on Monday parts of her distillery start turning up in the spare parts yard by the mines. On Tuesday the newly rebuilt town square is flooded with peacekeepers she doesn't recognize, and all she can do is swallow dryly when she spies a whipping post that had never been there before, rising like a concrete obelisk in the town center, casting a long shadow against the Town Hall building.

She wonders how much more people in the Seam can take. She and her little family have been struggling for so long, and she is so tired. She knows Gale must feel the same. Sometimes she watches him when he walks in the door late at night, home from the forest or school, and as he unties his worn black leather boots she can see the lines of tension etched his face.

It's not a surprise to her that Cray disappears on Wednesday, and in his place is a severe looking man whose eyes are as sharp and dark like flint. If cruelty had a face, she decides, it'd be his.

Out of curiosity she ventures to the Hob on Thursday. It's nearly deserted, and Sae shoos her away, bleating at her angrily: "Get moving girl. It's already starting, and you won't be seen anywhere near here if ya' know what's good for you."

What exactly was starting she didn't know, but she trusted she would soon enough.

_Sae had yet to be wrong._

* * *

**_A/N:_**

**_So, normally I post an outtake from the next chapter, but this week I wanted to do something a little different and post a drabble from Gale's point of view. I've been posting them on Tumblr, but I really don't like the format. If you want to find me on Tumblr, Im .com, and I usually post as I write, but I'm going to start posting the editing drabbles here._**

* * *

**_Gale:_**

_There's a difference between having a natural knack for something, and practicing that thing so much it becomes second nature. Some are born knowing how to do a thing, and others chase it so hard their want for it makes it theirs, even if its unnatural. The line is blurry, but its there- and I know it when I see it._

_I'm good with my hands. I was born that way. My fingers are long and my palms are wide and strong, so I already had a head start, but tying knots, working wood and holding my hands perfectly steady are things I learned I could do by accident. It's a good thing that I can, because there's a lot of other ways I'm unlucky and my hands are what keeps me and my family fed._

_Snares are easy. They come natural to me too. The trick isn't to think of a smart way to trap an animal, but to think how an animal would think, and work your way forward from there. A few of the snares that I know Dad taught me, the rest I made up all on my own. Some I designed easy for Katniss when I was still teaching her how to tie a knot. She has smaller hands than mine, so her snares alway ended up with knots that were too tight. I showed her how to use two fingers instead of one when she was tying slipknots and it solved that problem pretty quick. Didn't have the heart to tease her about being so small, even though that's usually something I would have done with anyone else. I know she's the way she is because her Mama is dead useless._

_Being angry is the last of what comes natural to me, and I don't know where it starts and I end because its braided up so tightly in me that the cords of everything else I am just get lost. Mama doesn't like it. She purses her lips tight when Rory and I get into it, and then her face turns blotchy and she grabs us by our ears until we yowl. And that's if she's home. If not, we just tussle until I win._

_The problem is I don't know when to stop. I just get worse and worse until I break something or fight someone and then all of it leaks out of me like I'm a rag twisting myself dry. After that I'm fine. Keep going like nothing happened. Used to be I'd cry afterward- like all that energy just leeched me to nothingness and I'd shake and whimper until I fell asleep._

_That was a long time ago. Before Dad got swallowed up by the mines. Now there's always a little something left me that wants to keep going even after everything is done, and I don't cry. I just wait because its not over for me. Not yet._

_Like I said, its hard to know where me and my anger are different._

_Maybe we're not. Maybe its just what I am._

_After all that, you'd think I'd want to ram my fist through Peeta Mellark's face the first time I catch him eyeing Katniss in the school yard. Funny thing is, I don't._

_Peeta's ok for a Townie. Really._

_In another life, we probably could have been friends._

_He and I have something in common: Katniss won't go for either one of us, no matter how moony-eyed we look at her. She doesn't like that kind of crap anyway. So in the end, we both get to follow her around like little puppies, and its all actually just funny. Instead of being jealous I just feel a weird kind of camaraderie with him, which is more than I've felt for any other Townie._

_Plus, he's so damn nice. If it ever came down to it, and Katniss had to choose between us, he'd probably bow out just to make life easier for everyone else. See what I mean? It's kind of impossible to hate the guy._

_So really, its not him I'm mad at when Katniss starts pulling away from me._

_And its not her, because she's so oblivious it's hard to take anything she says about what she wants seriously._

_It's me._

_I am angry that I am failing her. Angry that I am failing my family. Angry that I can't find a better solution to getting us all fed and getting the bills paid. Angry that I can't fix what's wrong with her. Angry that she went and-_

_She did it for us._

_I get that. She saved us._

_**And I hate it.**_

_Katniss Everdeen was born knowing how to throw herself in front of a moving train to save the ones that she loves. Me? I was born capable and angry. I thought she was like me. She's not though, she's just scared and desperate. She just wanted so badly to survive that she became like me. Funny how it takes someone saving your life to know that there are some things you'd rather die than have to see someone do for you. To see how someone you thought you knew like the back of your hand was a stranger all along._

_In the end, I realize there are lots of things I was born with a knack for, but none of them help me love her. That doesn't come to me naturally._

_It does to Peeta Mellark though. I wish I could hate him._

_Maybe I'll learn to._

* * *

**_As usual, none of this would have ever gotten done without my wonderful beta, Opaque! Seriously, she's amazing!_**


	5. Misdirection

_**v.**_

* * *

By the time she notices that something is different, the trees are bare and the temperatures have plummeted. Piles of leaves tumble across the hard-packed, frozen dirt in the schoolyard, and frigid afternoon rainstorms send chills straight to her bones as she makes her way either home or to work. At one point or another throughout the day she is either cold or wet, and sometimes a truly miserable combination of both.

In the school bathroom's mirror Katniss pulls up her eyelid and watches the veined orb underneath roll left and right. The dim lighting of the dingy space colors her irises nearly black, and the whites of her eyes seem brighter in contrast. She drops her eyelid and turns her head slowly from side to side. Her cheeks have filled out, rounding ever so subtly, and brushed a glowing, raw pink by the autumn winds. Her hair has a new luster too, shiny and dark enough to be striking, even against her olive skin. Running an exploratory finger over the ridges of her braid, she wonders at the changes a few weeks of hearty food could bring.

She drops her gaze from the mirror to the rusted tap and twists it on. With cupped palms, she collects some water and splashes it on her face. It's cold against her skin, sending chills down her spine and drips down her neck and under her sweater. It feels good after spending hours trapped in a stuffy classroom warmed by a hissing gas heater that must have been no less than a hundred years old. There's no towels in the bathroom, but she's perfectly happy to let the nip of the cold sting her face anyway as she exits the musty room and heads toward the school cafeteria.

A light flickers rapidly overhead, and she makes the mistake of letting her gaze drift up. The flashing burns in her eyes and throbs echo angrily in her head. She rubs the heels of her palms in her eyes, and in the black-red darkness behind her eyes she prays that today will not be the day her headaches come back.

It's been a week since her last headache. A blessed seven whole days of a clear head and steady stomach, and already she's dreading the end of this reprieve. All the same, she can't help the giddiness that overtakes her as she lies in bed after each day passes without pain. But she doesn't dare believe that this is the end. She doesn't dare let herself hope.

But if they are...if they're truly gone, then she and Gale and Rory can go out beyond the fence, this time all together. They'll be able to catch and carry home even more than before, and they'll have more food and more money- enough, maybe, for a new dress for Prim. A new pair of pants for her. New boots for Gale. Maybe even a toy for Posy.

She doesn't let herself think on this further. It is too much to hope for, little better than wishful thinking, and she knows better than to plan for a future she might not ever get to have. What use was wishing for the best when it was the worst that always seemed to make itself real?

With this grim thought, she plops down at a table by herself and realizes with surprise that what she really needs at that moment is something to distract her from her uncertainties- other than food. Lunch has gotten lonely without Madge.

Picking bitterly at her roll, she tries to get as much into her stomach before the bell rings as she can, but doesn't have much success. The tables around her are packed with Merchant and Seam children alike, boisterously talking and sharing food, and she supposes she could join Gale at his table if she had the mind to. She sneaks a look at him and his upperclassman friends as Thistle McCullough strides by the table and one of the rowdier boys pants comically after her like a dog. When Thistle doesn't react, he throws his head back and barks, and Gale's table erupts in cheers and laughter. Through the chaos, Gale catches her gaze from across the room and grins, motioning her over.

Instead of joining him, she turns around and glares out the window distractedly.

Madge hasn't been back to the lunchroom since she snapped at her, and she's deftly ignored her in the halls. Katniss supposes she deserves it. But when the chair beside her scrapes the floor with a loud squeal, she halfway expects that its Madge coming back to sit with her despite their fight. She's disappointed to find that it's not though, its Delly, whose round face brightens as Katniss looks at her in question.

"Hi Katniss," she chirps. "I saw you all alone. Everything ok?"

Katniss flushes in embarrassment and frowns down at the table.

"Fine," she mutters, and takes a dutiful bite of her food. She misses Madge.

"Well, I never see you alone. You're always with Gale or your sister or someone. You're sure you're ok?"

"Yeah, just- um. Not hungry."

She pushes the roll away from her finally, and her fingers fidget with the brown paper bag that held her lunch.

"Do you want some of my cheese? I don't really like it, and I don't want to throw it away," says Delly cautiously. Katniss wants to refuse on principle, but since starting work at the bakery she's found she has a particular weakness for cheese. And she'll need her strength for this afternoon's shift. A few bites of bread will definitely not take her through the day.

Delly hands it to her and smiles shyly, and though Katniss isn't particularly keen on her company, she finds herself warming a little to the vivacious girl.

"Thanks- I, um, really like cheese," she says quietly, and Delly smiles widely in return.

"See? I knew we could be friends!," Delly teases with a bright grin. "All it took was a little food."

Katniss takes a cautious bite of the cheese and shoots a half-hearted glare at her.

"Oh come on," says Delly, nudging her arm. "I bet under all those scowls you're actually really nice."

"Don't let her fool you, Cartwright. Underneath those scowls are even more scowls," laughs a voice from behind them. Katniss rolls her eyes.

"C'mon Catnip," he says with a smirk. "Lets get you to class before Cartwright here tries to buy you off with more cheese."

Katniss shoves her things in her bag and stands up quickly.

"Thanks again," she mumbles to Delly. The blonde fidgets nervously, chewing her bottom lip.

"Wait- Katniss, I need to talk to you about something."

Gale's dark gaze shifts to the blonde girl and Katniss knows that look. He's dissecting her.

"Um. Ok. Gale, go ahead. I think I can find my own way to class."

That dissecting gaze is turned on her, and she feels the secret she has kept from him rising to the surface of her mind. The seizure- the one she had never told anyone about. But if he reads it on her face, he doesn't let on because he shrugs and says: "Ok. I'll be waiting out front for you after class."

Katniss nods and fidgets. Gale frowns, pausing for another moment, before he seems to think better of saying anything and heads off.

Delly watches their exchange with interest, but wisely says nothing after Gale leaves.

"Ok, what's going on?," Katniss says.

"Well, actually, its more like I need to ask you for a favor."

Katniss sets her mouth grimly. She isn't in the business of doing favors.

"It won't cost you anything," Delly says quickly. "You won't even have to do anything, really."

Katniss narrrows her eyes, waiting for her to continue.

"It's just… I know you're working for Peeta now. He, uh, well he mentioned that you offered to help him and I wanted to thank you for that. It means so much to him- he's been working so hard since-" Delly's eyes water ominously, and her eyes dart around the room. "-well, since, you know."

Katniss had done no such thing, but she nods along anyway. Peeta had lied. To his best friend. _For her._

He was either an incredibly talented liar, or Delly was incredibly naive.

"Anyway, I know you're already doing so much, and you must really care about him to help him like this, so I almost feel bad asking, but could you keep an eye on him? I can't go visit him everyday, but I'm really worried Katniss. I don't think he's sleeping, and yesterday he told me he's been having _nightmares_."

She whispers _'nightmares'_ loud enough that she can hear it, but in a voice that implies that Delly believes that whatever Peeta is dreaming about is much, much worse than a simple nightmare. Katniss has heard about something like that. People used to come to her mother after having them, begging her for something to make them go away. Her mother would just shake her head sadly, and tell them there was nothing she could do. Katniss had heard them described- dreams so terrible and so incredibly real that you were trapped in your worst fears with no hope of waking unless you were woken by someone else- or your heart stopped. Night terrors, they were called.

Her stomach flips nervously, and a strange sense of foreboding fills her as she realizes that Delly is confirming two things she has suspected for some time now: one, that Peeta Mellark is a very accomplished liar, and two, that he is in trouble, and there is no one he trusted enough to tell.

For the rest of the day, its like she's there but she's not. Time leaps around dizzyingly. At one point she's leaving the cafeteria, and the next she's midway through history without remembering what happened in between. Her mind is working like she sees Gale's doing when he's formulating out a new trap, but there's something she's missing. Some vital piece of information that will make sense of everything. Then suddenly she's outside and class is over, and Gale is walking up to her with that look from before on his face- the one where he's mentally opening her up and picking her apart.

He knows something is going on. He knows that she's keeping something from him, but he can't figure out what.

'Well good,' she thinks. 'At least we're both in the same boat.'

"Alright there Catnip?"

"Yeah," she says. "Just tired."

"Your head doing ok?"

"Yes. No headache."

Gale smiles broadly, no little pride on his face.

"Its been what now, at least a week, right?"

She can't help but smile a little too, relieved that months worth of bark-flavored tea and frequent nausea were finally coming to an end.

"Seven days," she confirms, but as soon as she does, her mind is drifting back to the puzzle that is Peeta Mellark.

Gale knocks her in the shoulder lightly with his fist.

"Look at you, Catnip. I think you got this thing beat."

"Yeah," she mutters distractedly. "Maybe."

"What's going on with you? You seem-," he gestures vaguely "-out of it. Spacey."

She looks down at her boots, the toes of which are worn so heavily that they're a different brown entirely from the rest of the shoe. She needs to lie- and lie very well. How would Peeta do this?

"Do you think it's true what they say about-" she starts, and then mouths the last part soundlessly"-the Capitol?"

Misdirection. Get Gale to talk about his favorite thing- rebellion.

"Katniss-" he hisses in warning, his eyes darting around wildly.

Katniss gestures at her eyes, then points to his lips, trying to get him to understand that she can read what he says even if he doesn't use his voice.

Gale is silent for another moment, training his eyes downward before shooting her a sideways glance and shaking his head. And then, suddenly, he throws an arm around her and nuzzles her ear. She tries to squirm away from him but he holds her fast, his breath hot and sticky against the shell of her ear.

"Relax, just- calm down Katniss. I'm going to tell you what I know, but it has to be like this. Try to act normal."

He's too close. She hates it. This was a mistake.

"There's a rebellion. It's quiet, and its small, but its growing. I don't know who set the fire, but the Capitol seems to think that it was set by someone from the Seam, and they've been 'punishing' us ever since. Only, none of it seems to be having any effect. I heard they messed with the Tesserae, replaced the grain with something that's not toxic but doesn't have any nutrition either. So people are eating, but its not food. Its something else, I don't know what. But whatever it was, it didn't do what they wanted it to. So they've been cracking down in other ways. Following people at the Hob and keeping lists. Replacing Cray. I wouldn't be surprised if they shut the mines down next."

He pulls away from her, dark eyes glittering in that strange place somewhere between cold anger and giddy excitement that only Gale seemed to be able to get to. She swallows as she meets his gaze, fiddling with the strap of her bag. Disconcerted by his sudden closeness, she is unable to formulate any believable response.

But Gale must have thought this was what had her so upset in the first place because he smiles reassuringly at her.

"Don't worry," he says. "You look fine. _I swear._"

She understands that what he's swearing is that everything will be fine, because they both know she's not one to fuss about what she looks like. But this is another one of Gale's unkeepable promises, so instead of responding she just nods mutely and shoves her hands in her pockets.

Gale's pace slows suddenly, and then he comes to a complete stop.

"Uh, Katniss, I have to go," he says. She glances up and sees him looking just a little ways up the road, where, of all people, Madge Undersee is shifting from foot to foot and watching them apprehensively. Katniss narrows her eyes at Gale and she feels an odd fury building in her gut.

Was Madge waiting for Gale? And, more than that, how did she know where to wait for him?

Before she can say anything, he darts off without looking back, and her mood completely blackens. Madge looks at her guiltily as Gale takes her arm and tugs her forward, already saying something to her in a low voice. Her gaze stays locked on Katniss long after they've veered off down a side street, before the pair finally disappear behind a building.

By the time she's walking toward the bakery for her shift, she's furious, and has no idea why. She tries to find what, exactly, about Gale's departure with Madge has her so worked up, but all that serves to do is wind her tighter.

Was she angrier at Gale, or at Madge? Was it because she was in a fight with Madge and expected Gale to stay away from her because of it? Or was it because Madge's anxious face, the shift in her weight from foot to foot that implied guilt, and Gale's abrupt departure all seemed to point that there was something going on between them?

There- that was what nettled her.

That despite everything that she and Gale had shared, there was one thing they never would, because she would never allow it. It wasn't something she had ever considered, let alone wanted. And there was no use in it, anyway, because where would it lead? She could never marry him. Or give him a child.

For the first time, she shifts their positions, and imagines the world through his eyes. Imagines that it's her that wants _affection_ like that. Imagines watching her friends with envy as it happens for them. Imagines that's its Gale who becomes sullen and quiet at the mention of marriage and families and children, while all along secretly desiring those things herself.

It's not so much of a stretch, then, that he would seek that kind of relationship in someone else. And Madge, she grudgingly admits, could be good for Gale in ways she never could be. She and Gale are too independent to really be patient with each other's shortcomings, and too stubborn to ever resolve an argument without someone getting hurt. Madge could be compassionate where she couldn't. She was smarter in some ways too. Really, Katniss thinks, she should feel happy for Gale.

But all she can find within herself to feel is disgust. How could he even consider that kind of thing with the Capitol breathing down their necks like a pack of wild dogs? Didn't it concern him at all that at any moment the Capitol could swoop in and squash them all like so many ants under a boot? Did he forget completely about the Reaping? About the Hunger Games?

Meaningless sudden death. Starvation. Drought. Fire. All reasons to avoid any kind of entanglement as much as possible, lest it become what ruins you. _And it would ruin you._ Like it ruined her mother.

And then she thinks something that freezes her breath inside her; a thought so utterly confusing that it continues to churn in her mind, oscillating hollowly, until she reaches the bakery.

Why, if she so adamantly did not want children or a family, was she so upset that Gale might want that with someone that wasn't her?

As her hand closes around the door handle on the back door of the bakery, she comes to a decision: none of those questions were answerable, at least not immediately, nor did they matter in any way that wasn't abstract. What mattered was what was real and in front of her. What was solid and quantifiable. Food. Clothing. Shelter. _Staying alive._

She swings the door open, and the roar of the oven fans greet her in a rush of heat and sound.

"Boy are you a sight for sore eyes," says Peeta as he enters the kitchen to greet her.

Its a terrible joke.

Its not funny at all.

Because a welt has swollen his left eye shut, and for all his lying, clever misdirection and deft camouflage, Peeta finally has encountered problem he cannot fix with words.

* * *

There are things she remembers about her mother that sometimes come back to her, even if she avoids thinking about her. It's kind of impossible for them not to- afterall, there was a time when her mother had been a _mother_.

She was ten, a few short months away from the mining accident that would kill her father, when she got in a fight at school. This was before hunting was anything more than something she did occasionally with her father. Before his bow became hers, before her hands became calloused, before her legs became strong. She had lost that first fight, which wasn't much of a surprise, and limped home with a black eye and a nosebleed, sniffling forlornly and scratching at the itchy tear trails that had dried on her face.

She doesn't remember the why she had been fighting in the first place, but she does remember that when she got home, her mother had been there to wash her face. To hold her. She had pressed snow coat, sweet and cold, to the cut on her cheek and her black eye as they sat together in her rocking chair in front of the fire.

_It hurts so bad to remember how her mother used to be._

The memory slips through her fingers as she stares at Peeta and realizes that there is a reason he is so adept with words. He had learned a specialized kind of survival, where the rules were fluid and unfair and he would never, ever win. He stood no chance, really. He never had.

Questions burn the tip of her tongue, but she knows better than to ask. Whatever game Peeta is playing he isn't about to reveal, and any truths she wanted she would have to uncover on her own.

It's not cold enough for snow. Not yet. So there will be no snowcoat for Peeta.

And there will be no one to wash his face for him. Maybe there never has been.

There will be no one that will hold him. No rocking chair in front of a fire.

And if anyone deserved those things, it was Peeta.

Her jaw clenches as she searches for the right words to say, but those slip by her too. Words were never something she had been good at. Doing is what she is good at.

The odd little smile Peeta had been holding mechanically on his face fades just slightly as he watches her reaction. Its enough to set her in motion.

With two quick strides she is at the stove and puts the kettle on. Without a word, she disappears to the front of the store where she switches the sign hanging in the door from 'Open' to 'Sorry- We're Closed!" and locks the door with grim determination. Then she is back in the kitchen, slamming a mug down on the steel counter and raiding the pantry for black tea.

Peeta watches her with a quiet mix of embarrassment and wonder as she shoves him down onto the only chair in the kitchen- the one he usually used to prop open the back door.

"Katniss" he says "Say something- please."

"Where is the cheesecloth?"

"Huh?"

"Cheesecloth. I need some."

"Um, its on the shelf over the sink. Far right."

She finds it, tears off a square, and puts it on the counter next to the mug. Then she drags over her pack and retrieves the leather satchel she has been using to store her willowbark. She takes a healthy pinch of it and puts it in the center of the cheesecloth, then mixes in some of the black tea. She brings the corners of the cloth together and twists until she has made a makeshift teabag. She holds it over the mug and pours the boiling water from the kettle through the bag, effectively brewing tea and making a poultice for Peeta's eye all at once.

She puts the tea on the work table in front of him.

"Tilt your head back," she says.

When he does, she checks that the poultice isn't too hot before gently holding it to his eye, while threading her fingers through his hair to support the back of his head.

"Katniss, I-"

"Shh. Just... don't move, ok?"

"Ok."

"That stuff from my bag is willowbark," she says quietly. "It will get rid of the pain, but it tastes horrible. Just a fair warning."

Distantly she can hear someone knocking on the front door, their garbled words muted by the glass storefront. Neither she nor Peeta make any effort to move. Her blood is pounding in her veins, and that thing from before, the flicker, is back. Peeta's lone good eye is trained unwaveringly on her face, examining her like she's some kind of riddle. It has to be the heat from the ovens that has her feeling so light-headed.

Then a knock thunders at the back door and she can sense that he is anxious to answer it by the way he squirms in his seat and his eye flickers over to the door. She grabs his hand and pulls it up to hold the poultice over his eye.

"I'll get it. Stay here."

"No- hang on. It'll only take a minute."

He fetches a large, white paper bag with his free hand, tucks it under his arm, and swings the door open. A sense of de ja vu washes over her when she sees a scrawny black-haired boy with a cut on his chin standing there. He and Peeta exchange a few quiet words, before Peeta hands him the bag, and the boy dashes off.

How often was Peeta allowing his customers to put their purchases on a tab? How was he keeping track of who owed what? She had seen the bakery's ledger- more often than not their sales don't match their expenditures, let alone clear a profit. And there were no mentions of individual customers who owed them money.

Peeta's cramped numbers sprawled haphazardly across the pages and could be hard to read, sometimes to the point of total illegibility. Some days he wrote nothing at all, as though no sales had been made, but she knew full well that there had been. Other entries were full of errors, but the final sales figure always seemed to make sense to him.

Prim had a saying she liked to use: _"If it quacks like a duck, chances are its not a goat."_ It's absurd, but holds a kernel of truth: the simplest explanation is often the right one. If the numbers seemed wrong, they probably were.

But there was no way he would be honest with her about that either.

Maybe he wasn't particularly skilled in math. It would certainly explain why the totals were sometimes off. She wracks her brain for memories of Peeta and math, but comes up with nothing. That wasn't really such a surprise- she rarely paid attention to anything that happened in school. If he was too ashamed to ask for help she could understand that, even if it was stupid and risky not to do so. The Capitol provided the bakery with grain, and god help Peeta if they found out he was cooking the books.

She opts to bite her tongue (for now), but resolves to get the truth from him soon as she can. Frustrated, she heads to the storefront and starts to close up the shop: packing away the day-olds, flicking off lights and counting the till. Peeta silently joins her a moment later, perhaps sensing her irritation, and she is hyper-aware of his self-conscious movements as he uses one hand to wipe down the counters while holding the now cold poultice to his eye.

When they're finished, she makes him choke down the tea, and he jokes that it tastes "like tree". She smirks and rolls her eyes heavenward.

"Peeta, its treebark. It literally is tree."

He eyes her curiously.

"That's cool, that you know how to do that stuff. How do you know what tree to get it from? Can it be any tree, or just a specific one?"

"Has to be a white willow," she says, casting him a sidelong glance. "There's one by the fence."

Its a lie. Willows only grow by bodies of water, of which there are none within the confines of the fence.

"Huh. What does it look like?"

There's no way to answer that, because if she describes what the tree really looks like, Peeta will realize right away that there is no such tree in the entirety of Twelve, but if she lies and Peeta is silly enough to try to make tea out of some other tree's bark, he could poison himself. So instead of answering, she stands up and pulls the poultice away from his eye. The caffeine in the tea had reduced the swelling somewhat, but the wheal is still terrible to look at: a painful black-purple, tinged sickly green around the edges. At least the cut in the center didn't seem shiny or pink, so chances are it wasn't infected.

"You have to keep this clean," she says. "When the swelling goes down, we can check your eye and make sure that its ok. But you can't let the cut get infected. Black tea will sterilize it."

"Thank you. You have no idea how much I-," he looks away and purses his lips, considering something. "-how much I've appreciated all your help." If there was ever a joke worth laughing at, it was this one, because Peeta, who had saved her life twice over, was thanking her. All she can do is nod and let the hatred she feels for her own cowardice burn hotly in her chest.

"I'll check it again tomorrow morning."

Its then that Peeta tugs lightly on the cuff of his sleeve, a familiar action that sets off alarm bells in her mind. Whatever he said next she couldn't trust to be true.

"Actually, don't worry about coming in tomorrow," he says. "Take the day off. I'm sure you could use it."

And just like that, she knows, come hell or high water, that she is going to be at the bakery the next morning. If she wants her answers, she will get them then.

A short time later, she packs her bag and prepares to leave. Peeta busies himself with the sales ledger, but barely skims the page before he snaps it shut and thunks it onto the table. He follows her to the door and holds it open as she heads out into the early evening, just as the sun is dipping down past the horizon line.

"Katniss, wait," he says suddenly "I..." One corner of his lips rise, but its not a smile, its more like a grimace, and he seems to lose his nerve, his lips tightening just slightly before his face becomes stony and unreadable. "Thanks again."

She nods, and slips away. Briefly, she's not sure why, she turns around and is surprised to find that he's watching her, still standing exactly as she left him, propping open the door with his arms hanging limp at his sides.

She wonders what it was that he had wanted to say.

* * *

"WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?"

It's Gale. She's nearly half-way home when he barrels onto the road, yelling at her as though she were a child who had run away at the market.

"At the bakery. I stayed late."

"You stayed late? Why didn't you tell anyone you were going to do that? We've been looking all over for you!"

"I didn't know I was going to. And why didn't you check the bakery first?"

"Because we thought you might have-," Gale bites his tongue. "We thought you might have gotten _sick_ on the way back. We've been checking bushes and-"

Katniss blanches angrily.

"Are you _serious_? Gale, that was one time! And it hasn't happened since. I'm fine. I'm not going to be dead in the middle of the road because I'm an hour late coming home, and you need to stop making everything about that time in the woods. I don't need you to take care of me!"

"Katniss you didn't see what it what you looked like!"

"No, I just lived it. _So lay the HELL off._"

Gale never responds, just grabs her shoulders roughly and tugs her forward. She wonders if he's going to hurt her, but then suddenly his lips are on hers. Before she's even sure it's happened, he's pulling away and stepping back from her.

They're both breathing heavily, and Gale is flushed and sweaty despite the fact he's not wearing a coat.

"Me and Prim-" she spits venomously "-we're moving back home."

* * *

**A/N:** _**Hey guys! This was a monster of a chapter. Bring popcorn to Chapter 6 ;)**_

And now, a communique from Peeta circa Chapter 4 (this was also posted on tumblr a while back) :

_It's the second time this week that I'm too anxious to sleep. Staying in bed definitely won't help, but I linger there anyway. Not ready to give up yet, I guess. I'm probably being this stubborn because this has been going on for months, and I'm lucky that I'm even functional enough to actually run the bakery. If I can get any amount of sleep it'll be better than none at all._

_In actuality though, I'm lying to myself. Getting no sleep at all is better than the nightmares._

_Every time I close my eyes its her and fire and smoke. She falls and I watch her head crash against the cement and bounce grotesquely before she goes perfectly still._

_I'm there again- in the inferno that was the Merchant Quarter- and I can't find Dad or Mom or Rye or Durum. I'm running through the streets screaming for them and no one is answering, no one except for the owner of that terrified voice screaming "MOM!". I brush past her as she screams and its Katniss. I spin on the spot, wheeling around just as the house next to her collapses and the smoke and cinders swallow her. She hits the ground and I run for her- oh god not her not her-_

_But it is her and she's not moving. She's not moving and the world is burning all around me._

_I don't think of anything except how still she is, and how badly I don't want to live in a world where Katniss Everdeen is dead. How I wouldn't survive that, not really. Before I can even blink she's in my arms and I'm running- she's light and so heavy all at once, slumped against me like a sleeping child. Something clatters to the ground- its a bag with her bow and arrows. But there's no time to stop. I hold her against my chest and she's soaked in sweat and blood that's- oh god its coming from her head._

_I'm running running running through town and no one who sees us will know who we are because we're covered in ash so black the only thing left of us are our eyes and the trails of sweat that wick the soot away. We're just cinders leaping out of the fire and bouncing away from the blazing hearth._

_I bring her out of the roar and panic of the fire and into the comparatively cool stillness of the Seam, curled in my arms like she's just sleeping. But she's not, even I know that, and somehow that makes everything so much worse- makes her small, shallow breaths so much more sinister._

_I don't know where she lives, but by some incredible stroke of luck I find myself in front of what must be Gale Hawthorne's house and he bursts out of the door, wild eyes flashing like the headlights on a train, because even underneath all the soot he knows who she is. He'd know who she was if she had been brought home in a million parts, like a puzzle, and he and I would sit all night and try our best to piece her back together._

_You see, Gale Hawthorne and I have something in common: neither one of us knows if there's life after Katniss._

_We bring her in, stretch her out on the Hawthorne's kitchen table, and Prim gets to work boiling water and what all else I don't know because I won't leave Katniss' side or take my eyes off of her long enough to see. I curl her tiny hand between my larger hands, hold it gently, lean over the table and press our hands to my forehead._

_This plays like a movie every night in mind, only something is slightly off. I'll stumble and fall, and crush tiny Katniss and kill her. She runs into a blazing house before it collapses and she's gone gone gone with a fiery rush of smoke and ash. I'm running with her in my arms but she just gets heavier and heavier and my arms keep slipping around her. My feet don't move at all and I'm stuck in place, or running so slowly that we both disappear in the flames. I fail her._

_But I'm already living that nightmare. I've already failed her, so I don't need dreams to teach me that horror. I lost her bow. I lost what kept her alive, what kept her safe, all those years I stood by and watched her die slowly and thought every time she swayed dizzily in the school yard 'This time she'll really fall, and when she hits the dusty ground I'm sure I will too, because I'm too coward to save her life, and too coward to live without her.'_

_I make Prim and the Hawthornes promise not to tell her. I beg them to never tell her. That bow was everything to her. And me? I was nothing. Less than nothing. She never needed me._

_So tonight I don't sleep. I draw. Her. Over and over and over until my eyes are hot and dry and graphite smudges the tips of my fingers._

_'I'm sorry- I'm sorry- I'm sorry- I-'_

_It's nearing dawn when I have to stop. I wash my hands in water so cold it bites my skin to numbness. I dress in a daze, hands tingling and blood thumping heavily, lazily, through my body._

_I'm exhausted._

_I thud down the stairs, put the kettle on. Steam twists out of the spout in languid curls, and I grab two mugs out of the cabinet, set them on the counter and drop some black tea in the bottom of the cup._

_I don't know how I'll talk to her, or what I'll say. I shock myself with my own selfishness, because I'm so excited to show her my world. Show her my bakery, and all the things I make in it._

_Give her bread that only my hands touch. Feed her. Keep her safe._

_I watch the kettle. She'll be here soon._

* * *

**Mega-huge thanks to my beta Opaque, who somehow understands what I mean to say even if the first draft I send her is a sloppy mess of typos and run-on sentences.**

And a mega-huge thanks to everyone who reviewed Chapter 4, and to all the readers who lurk quietly as well! I'm just so tickled people are reading this!

Its the coolest thing ever that this weird thing that you do in your spare time people actually like!


	6. Cost and Effect

_**vi.**_

* * *

There are some days when Katniss looks at Rory and sees so much of his older brother in him that its like looking three years into Gale's past. Lanky and tousle-headed with a stubborn set in his jaw, he's the spitting image of Gale when he had been sixteen. He even smiles just the way Gale did, wide, bashful and all-of-sudden, as if he were surprised and mildly embarrassed to find himself doing so.

With everything that makes Rory like his brother, it's easy to forget that he is very much so his own person. There are times when she sees it though, like now, as he walks silently beside she and Prim, shouldering both of their packs with ease as they make their way back home- the Everdeen home.

Though he's two years younger than she is, he surpassed her in height long ago. Still, he seemed somehow _smaller_ than he was, and she doesn't think its just because when she met him he had been even scrawnier than Prim. Its something in the way he holds himself- loose and relaxed, always conscious not to loom over those around him.

Gale didn't hold himself that way. He never had.

Rory shoots her a quick glance out of the corner of his eye and then scowls down at his shoes- hand-me-down steel-toe boots that had once belonged to his older brother, and before that, his father.

"He shouldn't have done that," Rory says, and he doesn't have to elaborate. There's only one person he could be talking about. "I know its better that you do, but I wish you didn't feel like you had to leave."

Katniss keeps staring at his boots. How many mornings had she spent next to these very shoes as they carried Gale through the woods? Too many.

"You know why I have to," she answers.

"Yeah. I don't want you to go though," he says bitterly. "I like having you around. Its not fair." Rory kicks at the dirt, and for a moment, he is just eight years old again, angry that Gale was leaving for the woods again instead of playing with him. "I wish it was Gale that was leaving."

"No you don't," she chides, more callously than she means to. "Gale made a mistake. But everything he does, he does for you guys."

Rory looks embarrassed and hurt, but then his face hardens.

"No. He doesn't," he says. "Some things he does for himself. Just because he wants to. And he doesn't give a damn about what it does to other people."

She doesn't respond, partly because its true, but it won't help anyone, especially not Gale's family, if he and Rory get into a fight. But she also doesn't want to talk about Gale anymore, especially not with his younger brother who is so much like him.

She is weary of her own racing thoughts, ready to admit that she'd never understand why Gale would go and do… _that._ He knew better. He knew how she felt and he had still kissed her, as if everything she had said had meant nothing at all.

Maybe that was what had upset her the most. That Gale was willing to do without permission something she had expressed numerous times she didn't want. Gale was also older than she was, and though it was only by two years, and it had never mattered before, suddenly it seemed to matter a lot more when kissing was involved. He was on his way to having his own job and house, and she still had two years left of school. For whatever reason, this expanded the distance between them significantly.

He had kissed her. It had been her first kiss- not that that meant much. If anything it had been irritating and anti-climactic. She was supposed to feel _something_ at least, wasn't she?

It had been rough, and dry, and she had been angry.

'If that's what kissing is all about,' she thinks, 'then it's incredibly overrated.'

Adding to her confusion and frustration was that she couldn't see why she would be so upset that Gale seemed to be pursuing Madge. She didn't want Gale, she knew that much at least. Why did it matter if he wanted Madge? And if he had wanted Madge, why had he kissed her? Nothing about Gale's actions made sense at all. If anything, they all seemed to contradict one another.

Blessedly, her racing thoughts are interrupted when Rory goes tense and raises his arm in front of Prim to stop her from moving forward. "Hang on," he says. "Katniss- look. I think there's someone on your porch."

Her home stands dark and quiet- just another ramshackle house in a long line of leaning, coal-covered structures. She is still for a moment, just watching. In the dull light and shifting shadows, it's hard to make anything out. And then she sees it. Rory is right.

There _is_ someone on her porch, hunched over her door, moving in spasms and jerks. Even through the darkness, she can tell there is something wrong with them. Fear grips her.

In the past, a group of morphling addicts had tried robbing her mother. For whatever reason, they had thought that because her mother was a healer, she had access to morphling, or knew how to make it. Katniss had been out with her father, and Prim hadn't been born yet, so her mother was alone when it had happened. The addicts became desperate and angry when they discovered her mother had no secret stash of the drug, and wrecked their house. Her mother was unharmed, but the whole ordeal had shaken Katniss to her core.

Quickly, she runs through her options. Her only advantage in this situation is that they have gone unobserved, and she knows time is running out to make her move.

"Stay here," she whispers to Rory. "If anything happens... you and Prim- you just run. Don't look back."

"Katniss no- don't-," Prim starts, but its no use. Katniss is off like a shot, hugging the shadowy darkness around the run down houses as she makes her way forward.

"Hey," she yells loudly when she arrives at the stairs leading up to the front porch. "What are you doing?"

"Oh, well, isn't this just fantastic," grumbles a male voice.

The figure steps forward, and pale light from the glowing streetlamps catches on his face. Its Haymitch Abernathy. His long hair hangs in greasy strands around his face, and he's sweating and pale, making his skin appear waxen.

"_What_ are you doing?" she repeats.

"I'm was looking for Aster Everdeen. I have a cut. Or something."

"No you werent," she says accusatorily. "You were here for white liquor, weren't you? That's for cleaning wounds, not getting drunk."

"Well aren't you cute," he sneers, swinging his arms open. "You caught me. Now what are you going to do?"

He spins back around unsteadily, and slams his weight against the door. It doesn't budge.

"Hey- stop that!," yells Rory from just behind her. When had he crept up? Katniss glares at the younger boy in exasperation. Prim hangs further back in the shadows, watching the exchange warily.

'Good,' she thinks. 'At least Rory had the good sense to keep Prim out of the way.'

Haymitch looks over his shoulder.

"Great, now there's two of you. Listen, the Everdeens are dead anyway, so unless there's something I'm missing, they're way past needing whatever they got stashed away."

"The Everdeens aren't dead," Katniss snaps. "They're right here, in fact."

Haymitch stops trying to force his way through the door and breathes heavily, squinting at them through the darkness. Katniss steps forward, squaring her shoulders minutely and staring him directly in the eye, the way she would a wild animal.

"And I never said I would keep the liquor from you," she continues, an idea taking shape in her mind. "Just that it had a use. And it wasn't up for grabs."

Haymitch's face stays carefully blank, but she can see even through the darkness of the porch that he's catching on. If she remembered correctly, he was from the Seam too, and he would understand that she was suggesting a trade.

"Alright sweetheart. You've got my attention. What do you want?"

_Money. Food. Safety. _

All of those were things Haymitch Abernathy had in abundance. But when the light shifts and glints off the blade he has clasped loosely in his hand, realization strikes her.

All of those things were achievable and sustainable on her own if only she had-

"Your knife. I'll trade it for your knife."

Haymitch laughs.

He flicks the knife and twists his wrist, and in a flash of metal and moonlight, the blade disappears into the handle. With another series of lightning quick flicks of his wrist and fingers, the blade is out again.

"You couldn't handle this blade even if you had enough liquor to trade for it. Do you have any idea how much this cost?"

She raises her eyebrows.

"Don't know. Don't care. And frankly it doesn't matter, because Ripper's out of business, so I'm guessing that this is the last of the liquor in all of Twelve. I don't need it, but you are desperate enough to break into someone's house for it. Cost and value are two very different things in this situation, aren't they?"

She casually peels a piece of paint off the porch banister and flicks it away,

"And it's not your business if I can or can't use the knife... But, let's say I can't. Let's say I wanted a lesson on what you just did with it. Would a second bottle of liquor cover that?"

Haymitch blinks slowly and glares.

"You're pretty damn sharp, you know that? And fucking annoying," he grumbles. "Alright sweetheart. You got yourself a deal."

He thrusts his hand forward, and Katniss is struck at once by the stench of vomit and stale sweat that radiates from him.

She grasps his hand in hers tightly and shakes once.

"You wait here," she says, and motions for Prim and Rory to follow her inside so she can retrieve two bottles out of her mother's store of liquor.

She makes them both wait inside as she finishes her deal with Haymitch, catching flashes of Rory helping Prim clean up through the window. Its apparent in minutes that Katniss' small, quick hands are perfectly suited to handle the blade, and within in an hour she masters opening the knife with just a few flicks of her hand. Its a miracle that she does so well despite how distracting Haymitch's stench is. When she tells him this, he just grunts.

"Don't poke your eye out," he says as he stands to leave, the liquor bottles from her mother's medical stores clinking in his deep coat pockets. "Or do. Either way, don't bother coming to me for help. Hopefully I'll be just drunk enough to be useless."

She rolls her eyes, but her fingers never pause and she doesn't look up from them either.

The knife was an unexpected stroke of luck. It was easy to hide, sharp enough to slice shadows from the wall, and could always be readily available. Additionally, the cold metal had a comforting weight in her palm, and she sits practicing opening and closing it long after she sends Rory home and Prim to bed.

In the firelight of the kitchen, she works her fingers along the knife over and over, watching in fascination as her muscles learn to dance around the blade. For the first time in months, she feels like her feet are on solid ground.

* * *

Instead of sleeping, she leaves early for the bakery. After just a moment of hesitation, she slides on one of her mother's dresses on instead of her pants, which had become much too small for her anyway. If she wanted to pass them on to Prim, she couldn't afford to let the knees wear out. The dress had the added benefit of allowing her to easily store the knife in the top of her stockings. It pinches her thigh where the metal of the knife digs into her skin, but other than that it is surprisingly effective at giving her quick access to the blade, which jiggles reassuringly in her woolen tights with every step she takes through the still slumbering district. It is steadying, almost a relief, to have a weapon again. And this one is far more practical than a bow. Her steps are light as she approaches the bakery, so light that they're nearly silent, even with her boots on.

Which is lucky, because when she looks up from her shoes, she realizes she has been unintentionally trailing a group of Peacekeepers. Nothing good has ever come of Peacekeepers moving quickly through darkness, and her knees nearly buckle in fear. They hadn't seen her, thankfully, but they would have if she had been any louder. She pauses, her hands quaking at her sides, and her mind races.

There was only one place they could be going. Only one place on this street that wasn't a government building and currently dark and empty. At the very end of the street, across from Cray's old house, the bakery light is on, and a trail of peacekeepers are making their way unerringly toward it.

A burst of panic floods her veins and she stumbles forward, catching herself before she trips and forcing her legs to carry her faster, and faster, and faster. She won't get there in time. The door to the bakery opens and they file in, one after the other. Her feet slap the pavement as the door snaps shut with an echoing finality.

She doesn't stop until she's there too, hand fisted around the door handle, breathing heavily as she wrenches it open and bursts into the already stifling kitchen, her dress whirling around her knees and her eyes wide and wild.

Four of the peacekeepers are lined up on one side of the kitchen, but one of them has Peeta by the collar of his shirt and is hauling him across the room.

"Stop!" she yells, and every head simultaneously turns to her and her blood runs cold in her veins.

The peacekeeper who has by his collar shakes him.

"Who's that? Why is she here?"

Peeta's eyes dart from the peacekeeper to lock on her face.

"Perfect timing," he mutters.

He definitely doesn't mean it.

The peacekeeper shakes him again.

"_Who_ is that?," he says again.

Peeta smiles weakly and looks her directly in the eye when he says, "The future Mrs. Mellark."

The world tilts on its axis. _The future Mrs. Mellark. _Said so casually, so matter-of-fact. But she wasn't. She wasn't the future Mrs. anything. _What kind of game was he playing at?_

"What does she know?," he asks.

"Nothing," Peeta answers. "I haven't told her anything."

"That's not true," she says breathlessly. The only thing she can think is that if the peacekeepers needed something secret, it was better for Peeta for if it wasn't. "He told me about the sales ledger. That's why I'm here. I'm going to fix it."

The room goes silent and still, as if all the air had been sucked out of it. Her hand strays to her side, where she can feel the lump of her knife through her dress.

"He didn't do anything wrong. He's just-"

His words from before- _the future Mrs. Mellark- _buzz angrily in her head.

"-he's not very bright."

Peeta blushes darkly and the Peacekeeper releases him. It must have been the right thing to say, because he rounds on her next.

"Commander Thread wants this month's numbers and what's owed to the Capitol distribution center today. We'll be back at 5pm. Have it then."

"We will," she says.

As soon as the peacekeepers have left, she whirls around to face Peeta, who is adjusting his shirt and frowning.

"What the hell was that, Peeta?," she yells. "_The future Mrs. Mellark?_ Is this some kind of a joke?"

"They would have killed you," he says, eerily calm. "The only people cleared to work here are members of the Mellark family."

"Then what's going on? Why were they here?"

"You shouldn't have come," he says, his words laced with anger. "I told you not to come."

"Yeah, well, I'm here. What did they want?"

"To throw me a party," he says, rolling his eye. The other is still nearly black and swollen shut. Against his drawn face in the blue-grey morning light, the injury looks much worse.

"Tell me what they wanted Peeta," she snarls in response. "Because if you hadn't heard, we're going to have to give it to them before this afternoon or we'll both be dead."

"I owe the Capitol grain distributors money. A lot of money."

"Why? How?"

Peeta sighs heavily and rubs the back of his neck.

"What do you think the tesserae is, Katniss? Where do you think it comes from?"

"It comes from the Capitol," she says promptly. "It's low grade grain that they-"

"No. No it doesn't. It comes from right here. The bakery makes the tesserae rations. We get a list every month of how much to make, and it includes names."

Cold sweat beads on her neck, and whirring of the ovens hums in her ears. Her name had been on a list. That list had been in Peeta's hands, with how many entries she had put herself down for. Her mind spins with the possibilities. Had he know how badly off they were? He must have seen Gale's name too.

"And its not just any low grade grain," he continues. "Its whatever we have lying around that's past its expiration date. Whatever is stale or bad, mixed into a base grain that the Capitol supplies."

He taps a large tub under the table with the tip of his shoe and looks down at it, as if lost in thought.

"It's in here. This is the tesserae base grain. Only... I'm not sure its actually grain anymore. I'm not sure its food at all."

He bites down on the side of his lip and gnaws it thoughtfully.

"There are a lot of different types of grain, but the best ones have something called gluten. I don't know exactly how it works, but it makes the dough stretchy and gives it a certain texture once it's baked. The tesserae grain... it doesn't react that way. It takes twice as long to rise and half as long to bake. The crust is shiny and thin, but the bread is too dense and dries out in a matter of hours. I think there's something wrong with it."

Katniss moves over to his side of the table and peers into the container curiously, as if the differences between the grains were something she could see if she peered long enough into their depths.

"I started noticing a difference right after the fire. Before that, the tesserae grain was just like a low grade wheat flour. Now… I'm not even sure what it is. But I tried making bread with it a few times, and it even though it looks like bread, and tastes like bread, the dough doesn't work right. It doesn't bake the way its supposed to. It doesn't even fill you up. It's like its just… empty."

"But how can that work? How can something look like grain, but not _be _grain?"

"It'd be a grain without protein," he says matter of factly, and his lips purse.

"What would the point of that be?" she says, her brows knitting. Even as she says it, she knows the answer.

To feed them without feeding them. To starve them, even as they fill their stomachs.

_To punish them._

Her stomach clenches. It was too horrible. How many children- how many like her- had written their names down over and over to feed their families, only to bring home food that would never satisfy their hunger?

Light headed, she braces herself by placing a flat palm on steel table and lets the shock of the cold surface rise up her arm.

Peeta had known this the whole time.

"You knew," she chokes. "You didn't tell anyone. How _could_ you-"

"I couldn't. They would have killed them. They might still kill _us._ I couldn't risk it."

Something clicks into place in her mind.

"You saw my name. You saw Gale's. Our entries- you knew. The tesserae wasn't food... you knew we were starving."

Peeta is suddenly very interested in a scratch on the table top, running his index finger over it and scowling.

"That night-," she chokes. "You were watching for me, weren't you? You knew I'd come because you saw my name."

Peeta stills.

"You did."

"Yes," he says softly. "I did."

"You saved me. Again. Why?"

"Don't Katniss. Don't ask me that. You know."

"Goddamnit Peeta, give me a straight answer, for once!," she yells, and slams her fist down on the table. Peeta flinches away and a sickening guilt washes over her. A moment of horrible silence descends on the kitchen.

"I was watching," he says finally, his eyes still trained down. "I had to make sure. This time, I had to make sure. Katniss… I'm sorry. About the bread, when we were younger. I should have gone to you. I should have handed it to you. I should have made sure it would be enough."

"Peeta, don't," she mutters.

"You were so thin. I knew you were starving. And all I did was throw some burned bread at you."

"No Peeta. You saved me."

His lip curls. His expression is somewhere between a sneer and a grimace.

"Katniss, you saved yourself. I had nothing to do with it."

"I couldn't have done it without you."

"Well, it doesn't matter much now. We'll both be dead by this afternoon, and it'll be my fault," Peeta says and rubs his hands over his face.

"No," she says. "We won't. Bring me the ledger. We'll figure this out."

"Katniss, don't bother. I'll tell them you were lying, and you- just run. I'll make sure they know the truth. That you didn't have anything to do with this."

She frowns.

"Peeta, how bad is it?"

"Its bad."

"How bad?"

He mutters a number that knocks the air right out of her lungs.

"Jesus christ Peeta!"

"I know. I know. But listen- after I began thinking that the Capitol was messing with the tesserae I started adding some other grains to it. After the first week, I knew it wasn't enough. So I added more. After that, it snowballed. But people were still starving. So I tried to make it all fifty-fifty between the tesserae and the wheat flour, but I ended up needing twice as much grain for both because the tesserae grain was so useless. And that ate into the profits, and nothing even got any better. And then I found out kids were coming to the bakery trash looking for food, and I couldn't just stand by and watch... They were too young to take a tesserae, so I told them to come to me directly. I was so deep in already, I figured, what the hell."

He runs a hand through his hair and shakes his head as he turns away toward the oven. A trail of sweat is collecting around the neck of his thin cotton shirt and is dripping down his back. He turns back around slowly.

"They were going to starve people. Mostly from the Seam. Mostly kids," he says, and shrugs one shoulder. "I couldn't let them use me to do that. I don't want to die for it, but if I do, then so be it. I just wanted to show them that I wasn't their pawn. That they don't own me. Does that make any sense?"

"But… they do. They always have. They own all of us. Even if we never end up in the Games, we're all trapped in this fence."

"Yeah, but within the fence, we get to choose what we do. Its kind of all we have."

There was entire rebellion brewing in Twelve, stocking god knows what as weapons, with a secret form of communication, and a network of people that probably included men like Gale- desperate, angry and ready for a fight. But none of them were aware of the most powerful anti-Capitol force already silently at work in Twelve: Peeta Mellark. He had saved lives- probably more lives than he was even aware of, and he had done it all without a single weapon.

He just fed people who were hungry. Simple as that.

"I never wanted you to be involved Katniss. That's why I told you not to come."

"Yeah, well, you can't always get what you want, Peeta," she says with a slight smirk.

He laughs, and that strange flutter creeps back in her stomach. She purses her lips and clears her throat.

"We can't just give up. We have to try."

"_We_ don't have to do anything. You're going to leave, and I'm going to tell them you lied."

"No. Bring me the book. I can fix this."

"Katniss, please-"

"No. Give me the ledger."

Peeta raises his hands in defeat and fetches the book from a shelf over the stove.

"Alright, alright. But you're out of here at four this afternoon no matter what, ok?"

"Ok," she says, even though she has no intention of doing any such thing.

As she trolls through the pages, Peeta continues to set up the store for the day, as if his own mortality weren't hanging in the balance.

"I think you can leave off the bakery work for the day," she says. "Try to think of how we can come up with that money by five."

Peeta frowns minutely.

"People need to eat. They're depending on me. It might be the last time I can actually do something… and we'll make some of that money today," he says. "Hopefully."

"You're right. We will," she says.

He continues to bustle around the back room until it's time to open, and finally leaves her alone with the heat and the ovens as he disappears to the front of the store. The falsified numbers on the pages jump out at her- the discrepancies are laughably obvious. If he was going to defy the Capitol, did he have to be so sloppy about it?

She fights the urge to roll her eyes as she adds a string of numbers in her head and finds yet another mistake. It's almost as if he hadn't even tried to make these numbers look right.

Hovering just over the paper, her pencils stills.

Maybe he hadn't.

_Maybe he wanted to get caught. _

She thinks about how empty the bakery seemed when she left at night, still and silent as a grave, and Peeta, moving through the thick darkness of the kitchen to ascend the stairs to the apartment above, alone until the store opened again the next morning- a pattern that would continue until he died. He is a sixteen year old boy who lost his family just a few short months ago, had been ordered by the Capitol to hand down agonizing deaths to people who had done nothing but live on the wrong side of Twelve, and had to choose his own death or the deaths of hundreds of others.

"_Within the fence, we get to choose what we do. Its kind of all we have."_

Of course he had chosen his own death.

As she finalizes the total for another day and turns the page, a horrible thought occurs to her. Had this ever happened before? Had Peeta's father ever had to make the same decision?

The puzzle that is Peeta Mellark comes into focus.

Of course he had. That's why the bakery could only hire members of the Mellark family. Because to work there meant sharing a horrible secret, and the Capital needed people who wouldn't betray one another and tell the entire district. They had to be more than friends. More than neighbors. _They had to be family. _

That's why the Peacekeepers had asked Peeta how much he had told her. That's why, to save her life, he had pretended they were engaged.

Her vision swims for a moment, the lights growing brighter and a odd shimmer dancing just around the edges of her field of sight, then it rights itself. Rubbing her eyes tiredly, she cracks her neck and shifts in her chair.

Maybe she should have tried to get some sleep last night...

An hour later, she snaps the book shut, the numbers finally balanced and correct. It had taken her far less time than she had ever expected to fix them, probably because Peeta had been so lazy with his records. She made most of the entries up, but at least their sales matched their output, and she doubted the Commander Thread would take a full inventory if the numbers seemed to match the distributions centers closely enough. That was all that mattered really.

Peeta is talking amicably with a customer in the next room, and the sounds of their voices carry faintly over the clamor of the ovens.

_You almost couldn't tell he had planned to die._

An odd numbness has taken root in her arm, and she rubs it absent-mindedly. The chair she's been sitting on for what must be hours now is hard, and pins and needles prickle in her feet. She stretches, tightening her muscles and then releasing. As she had moved her legs, the knife had shifted under her stocking and blood rushes to where it had left an indentation in her skin. She pulls up the side of her dress and yanks out the blade, rubbing the sore spot on her thigh to encourage the blood to flow.

She watches the pallid skin as it grows dark pink.

"Peeta!," she yells suddenly. "Lock up! Hurry!"

He pops his head in from the front.

"What? Why?"

"I have an idea."

* * *

"I don't have anymore knives, sweetheart," Haymitch slurs blearily after he yanks open the door.

He blinks slowly and yawns.

"Who's that? Another Everdeen?" He says.

"No. That's Peeta. He's the baker."

"Oh- ok. That explains _everything_. Why is he here? Why are _you_ here?"

"I want to trade."

"There's only one thing I'm interested in, and there won't be any more of it coming until next month. So unless you've got something hidden under that pretty dress, girlie, we got nothing to talk about."

Katniss smirks and pulls out a tiny bottle from her jacket pocket.

"You didn't think I really traded you the last of my liquor, did you?"

He grunts, and eyes it as her she swings it from its neck back and forth in front of his face.

"Ok. What do you want?"

She says the number Peeta gave her before, and Haymitch nearly chokes on his own spit.

"Is this some kind of joke?," he grinds out. "Get the hell out of here."

"You have it," she says quickly. "We need it. And money doesn't mean anything to you, Victor. But liquor does."

"You're insane," he says.

Peeta clears his throat.

"Its Capitol grade. Not home brew," he says. "It's over 160-proof. Mix that with some water or juice and you'll be set until the next shipment."

Haymitch eyes the bottle again.

"What's it to you, kid?"

"The money is for me."

Haymitch's eyes drift from the bottle to Peeta, and he peers at him appraisingly. Katniss can tell from the look on his face that even hung over, Haymitch's mind is working to put the pieces together.

"There's only one reason why you'd need that kind of money," he says finally. "And that makes you either stupid or suicidal. Or both. In any case, I can't help you. I don't have that kind of cash."

He is about to snap the door shut when Katniss shoves her foot in the jam.

"We'll trade you that, and the first bottles of rotgut I brew," she says. "You'll save money in the long run, not buying from the Capitol. All we need is time, all you have is money. And you'll get it back when you're not paying for expensive Capital liquor. It's a fair deal."

Haymitch frowns.

"You're gonna take over Ripper's clientele? Somehow, sweetheart, I feel like you and I have very different ideas about fairness."

Behind her, she can hear the sounds of children screaming and laughing as they race home from school. That means it's after three o'clock.

"Take it or leave it old man," she snarls. Haymitch's gaze drifts to Peeta, who is watching their exchange passively. Something like realization flickers on his face, then disappears.

"You're Barley's son?," he says to Peeta, who nods. Haymitch's eyes cloud over.

"Alright," he says finally. "I'll do it. Give me that."

He snatches the bottle from her, and scowls.

"Wait here."

When he returns a moment later with the money, she can feel her hands trembling as they close around the bills. Eyes wide, she shoves the stack in her jacket and tries not to think about how many months worth of food it could provide for her and her family.

"What does 'rotgut' mean?," Peeta asks after Haymitch closes his door, shooting her a sideways glance.

"It means you and me are taking a trip to the junkyard soon. Now come on," she says to Peeta shakily. "We need to get back."

"Katniss," Peeta says. "Thank you. So much."

"Don't thank me yet," she mumbles. "I've never held this much money in my life and I'm seriously considering running off with it and leaving you for dead."

Peeta laughs.

* * *

She wakes under the stars in the woods. Her woods.

Its wet and cold, but that's alright. It feels kind of nice. _Familiar._

She moves her fingers. Voices echo in the distance.

Voices?

Were there other people in the woods?

She sits up and dizzily raises a hand to her forehead. Every muscle in her body felt sore and ached as if she had been yanked in every direction all at once.

Branches stretch out over her head, but its not from multiple trees. Just from one. A few feet away, a worn dirt path snakes its way through piles of dead leaves, now iced over, and a smattering of dying grass.

Where is she?

That word floats back through her mind- _seizure._ This time, it had happened without warning on her way back home from the bakery. She had been tired, a little woozy, and then-

With no idea how long she'd spent on the ground, she props her back against the tree and shoves her fist in her mouth. She bites down deep into flesh of her hand, angry sobs shaking her thin form. Her other fist slams against the frozen earth- once, twice. With her hand throbbing angrily, she lets it fall loose by her side and stares into the branches above.

The already freezing tear tracks on her cheeks get blown raw and cold by the merciless autumn wind before she attempts to stand.

"Get up," she mumbles to herself sternly. "Walk home."

It takes her an hour to get home because she's still dizzy, and she's throwing up off the side of the porch when Prim rushes out and scoops her hair out of her face.

"Oh Katniss," she murmurs sadly. "It's ok."

Its not ok, though. _It's not._

Prim helps her back inside and presses a hot mug of tea into her hands. Holds her as she cries.

Gale had been right all along.

She _hates_ him.

* * *

**A/N: Hi guys! Give it up for my beta Opaque, who read this and got her edits in less than 24 hours! She's incredible!**

**Thanks for reading, I hope it was as fun to read as it was for me to write. Thanks to the kind folks who reviewed last chapter, and to all the silent readers out there just lurking too!**

**No previews this week, but I'll be posting snippets as I write them on my tumblr. So if you're dying to know what's going on, come find me there :)**


	7. Junk

_**vii.**_

* * *

She discovers the dead squirrel pinned to her door on Monday morning and viciously kicks a roof post on her front porch, scuffing her boot and stubbing her toe. Groaning as much in aggravation as in pain, and she considers what to do with it.

It's Gale's weird way of saying sorry without _actually_ having to say it.

Because only Gale would think pinning a dead animal to someone's front door was an appropriate apology.

And it would have been, all things considered, had he not come to her house in the middle of night to deliver it. It was _weird_ that he had been outside her house at some ungodly hour, maybe waiting for the lights to dim, before stealthily fastening his kill to her door.

If she removed the squirrel, he would take it as her forgiving him. If she left it, he would know she hadn't forgiven him yet (she hadn't), but there was the little issue of how it badly it nettled her to waste food. No matter what she did, she couldn't win.

_Even Gale's apologies were like traps._

She sighs heavily and settles on leaving it- for now. With the temperatures hovering just above freezing, the squirrel would keep until she could make a decision. At the very least, she needed time to decide what she hated more- Gale thinking he was in the clear, or wasting what could be a perfectly good meal.

She sets off for school, breath rising in clouds in front of her face. Prim is home sick today, and as much as she didn't want to leave her home alone, the punishment for repeated truancy could be severe, and she needed to save her absences in case things got tough this winter and she needed to hunt.

The thought of the woods, soon to be covered in pristine snow, makes her ache to be heading anywhere but the stuffy, dusty school building. There had never seemed to be any point to the kind of education they got in Twelve, but it seems especially pointless after the fire, where so many of their classmates were killed.

The extra desks in the classrooms are testament to the tragedy that had rocked Twelve over the summer, and seeing them everyday is as good as having their classmates tombstones in the room with them. It reminds her of the Games- how the desks of the Reaped children stayed empty until the end of the year, and teachers and students alike had an unspoken rule of never mentioning the missing child, or looking at the desk where they once sat.

This morning when she sees the unfilled chairs, all she can think about is how many more there'd be if it weren't for Peeta.

Classes pass in a monotonous blur. She chews on her pencil. Watches the trees shift in the wind out of the window. In third period, heavy clouds collect on the horizon. In fourth period, the sky darkens noticeably.

In lunch she catches Madge's gaze from across the cafeteria. She's sitting uncomfortably next to Gale at his table full of older Seam boys near the back of the room. Gale sees Madge staring and follows her stare to Katniss. As Gale's eyes meet hers from across the room, Katniss' shoves her chair back and stalks out of the noisy room.

The same question that had plagued her for days floats back through her mind.

_Why had he kissed her?_

She finds herself wandering over to a stairwell that leads down onto the playground. Overhead, the sky is heavy matte gray. Its right around the time Twelve should be getting its first snowfall, and judging by the sky, it could be this very afternoon. Planting herself on the stairs, she picks at her lunch and ignores the cold seeping from the concrete steps through her pants.

Restlessness keeps her from enjoying her food. The school regularly searched students and their belongings, and, not wanting to risk losing it, she had left her knife at home. She regrets it now though- it would have been nice to have it.

It was soothing, meditative even, to run through the motions of opening and closing it. She was working on her speed- it was the most practical thing she could think to do with the blade. It didn't seem to be very good for throwing (she had tried in her backyard, and Prim had collapsed in a fit of giggles when the knife clattered against the back of the house and then sunk, tip first, into the dirt), but it was quite durable. Maybe she could learn how to carve with it…

A snowflake drifts from the sky, alighting on the tip of her boot before melting away.

She looks upward to see if anymore are coming when she spies a flash of pink in the schoolyard. A blonde girl disappears behind a tree, and a moment later a soft laugh floats to her ears.

Katniss flushes and shoves what remains of her lunch in her bag and stalks back into the school building.

_It's insane- to get involved with someone in that way, especially after the drought, after the fire, and with the Reaping less than six months away, how could anyone justify-_

She collides head on with Delly, and the larger girl grabs her arm to keep her from falling backwards.

"Oh- Katniss, sorry," she says breathily.

"Its ok," she mumbles, readjusting her bag on her shoulder.

"I was looking for you earlier. Can I talk to you?"

"I'm kind of busy," she mutters at the floor. Delly doesn't seem to hear her.

"I saw you run out of the cafeteria. Is everything ok?"

Every muscle in her body turns to stone and her neck prickles.

"It's fine," she snaps.

"Ok. Just wanted to make sure," Delly says in a small voice. "I saw Gale. And Madge. Are you sure you don't-"

"I don't," Katniss barks at her. "I have to go."

"Wait- Katniss," she says. "I just wanted to thank you- for Peeta. I saw him yesterday, he looked... much better."

Katniss tenses.

"He's like family to me." Delly's voice is trembling and tight. "I've been worried about him, you know?"

For once, she does. Even before she had known about what he had done for the Seam, Peeta always had given the impression of someone playing a game that was beyond his ability to win.

"So, if you're looking for a reason why I'm always on your tail… its because of him. You have no idea how much it means to him that you're there."

Delly pauses, mulling something over in her mind, completely ignorant of how uncomfortable her statements have made Katniss. If only Delly really knew why she was at that bakery. If only Delly knew what she had done. What Peeta had done…

"And, I know I shouldn't say anything about it, but, you seem so upset- whatever's going on with Gale... it'll work itself out."

Empty platitudes like that were one of the reasons she had never really liked Delly Cartwright. They had an ambiguous sincerity that served to obscure, but never really completely hide, what the speaker truly meant. If was hard to imagine Delly's intentions being anything but honest: her unassuming forthrightness had gotten her into deep trouble more than once. All the same, Katniss had difficulty reconciling how someone as naive as Delly could possibly have managed to survive this long.

A voice in her head she recognized as coming from Gale grumbled that it was because Delly had the _means_ to ensure a lifetime of naivete, but that was wrong. Even being part of the merchant class didn't ensure the kind of security Gale assumed it did, and she didn't have to look any further than Peeta to see that.

No… Delly may be sincere, but perhaps she hadn't been as naive as she had always thought. Somehow, Delly had seen that Peeta was in trouble long before anyone else had, even Katniss.

Something about her final thought makes her gut twist, even though it made sense that Delly would know before she did. They were, after all, close friends. And had been for years…

There had even been rumors (before the fire) of a marriage when school and the Reapings were finally over. Whether that was true or not she decides not to question before the horrible burning in her stomach grows any worse.

As the afternoon wears on, snow blows in lethargic flurries, though none of it really sticks. The events of lunch tumble over and over in her mind like she's somersaulting down a hill, and by the end of the day she can hear her blood thumping in her ears over the droning voice of her teacher. It had been such a mistake not to stay home with Prim and just skip school all together.

The moment the bell rings she flies out of the classroom and doesn't slow down until she's at the bakery. The blast of warm air that greets her when she tugs open the door burns her frozen cheeks and fingertips in welcome, and for the first time all day she's happy to be somewhere that isn't home. A few hours of packing orders and washing dishes should soothe her nerves.

"Well, well. Look what the cat dragged in," drawls a voice from the other side of the kitchen, and she groans aloud when she spies Haymitch Abernathy slumped in the chair, arm over the back and long legs stretched out in front him.

She throws her bag down by the door.

"Why are you here?" she snaps. "You have enough liquor to drink yourself blind. What else could you possibly want?"

Haymitch raises his thick eyebrows and smirks as he takes a short swig from his flask.

"Thought I'd check up on my rotgut," he says. "Make sure you're not trying to poison me. Imagine my surprise when I found out Ripper's still was in the junkyard."

His lips form a thin line.

"Any reason why Ripper's still would _still _be in the junkyard?"

Katniss jams her apron over her head and flicks her braid over her shoulder.

"Yeah- we haven't gotten it yet."

"And when, pray tell, do you plan on doing that?"

Peeta pops his head around the door.

"Is everything alright?"

"Yes. He was just leaving," Katniss spits.

"Actually, sweetheart," he drawls, standing slowly. "You want me here. I have a certain skillset that you haven't realized you need yet. That whole engagement thing you two got cooked up? Well they're only convinced that the boy is for real. You, on the other hand-," he gestures toward Katniss with his flask "-they're not quite sure you're in it for the long haul, so to speak."

"Who's not convinced?," Peeta says.

"Who cares?," she snaps.

"_The Capitol."_

A moment of silence passes through the kitchen and Katniss stares at Haymitch in complete horror.

For the past few days, she had been trying her best to perpetuate rumors that she and Peeta were engaged- with a (very) limited degree of success. Admittedly, she had very little personal experience in that respect, so all her knowledge was derived from her parents interactions. She had dug through her memories of the time before her father's death in an attempt to understand what would be expected of her. Much of it she decided would not be doing.

Mainly the kissing.

But the other things- the touching, the frequent glances- those she could manage.

Or so she had thought.

Peeta had been talking to a customer, with Commander Thread lurking around the front. He was on his way into the kitchen to fetch them a specialty order, when she saw her chance. She had meant to just brush his wrist with her fingertips, something light, with just enough intimacy in it to imply all the things she knew she absolutely wasn't going to be able to do outright (again, mainly the kissing). Unfortunately, her best effort was a disaster.

The second her skin made contact with his, he jumped.

Once Peeta realized what she had been doing, he had laughed, made some joke about how cold her hands were and played it off as though the whole thing had been some sort of accident, but the damage had been done.

Commander Thread wasn't convinced, and no matter what Peeta had told the peacekeepers, they believed she knew the secret purpose of the Bakery. They would come after her. They would kill her.

_Prim. Would they hurt Prim?_

She clenches her apron with an iron grip.

"Now she gets it," Haymitch says and takes a long drag from his flask. He smacks his lips when he's finished, then flops back down in the chair. "I can help you fix it. I know how they work."

"What do we do?," asks Peeta, his face hard. "How do we fix it?"

"First, you make a deal with Ripper or she'll come after you big time. Then you get that damn still out of the junkyard. After that, we'll talk."

* * *

Ripper lives in the only two story in house in the Seam. It's easy to find her place because the jagged roofline rises well above all the other's in the neighborhood, and because she's the only person in the District with a painted house. It's a washed out, faded pink- darker around the eaves and under the pipes than anywhere else. In the summer sunlight, it looks just slightly different than the other white washed homes of the Seam, but in the meek light of winter, against the white of the snow, the color of Ripper's house is obvious.

Soft pink- like a baby's blanket.

It was totally at odds with the gruff, no nonsense woman who lived inside.

Katniss had walked past it a few times, but had never been inside, so it was just as big of a shock to discover that nearly everything in Ripper's house was pink as well. Somehow, Ripper's home was everything and nothing she had expected all at once, she musedsilently as she stood in Ripper's cluttered pink kitchen, staring at her collection of chipped, floral tea cups.

Peeta looks over at her with his eyebrows raised in disbelief.

How Ripper had managed to get pink paint, let alone enough to coat her entire house, was something of a mystery in Twelve. Seam kids liked to make up stories about it- that she had once been beautiful enough to bewitch a Capitol man, and spent the rest of her life living in relative luxury because he was sending her money.

Katniss had somewhat of a more pessimistic idea, but it was probably closer to the truth anyway. Ripper had had that paint smuggled in- probably around the same time as the last change over between head peacekeepers, which had been over 25 years ago. She figured this out around the same time she started hunting, and it had given her the confidence to realize two very important things about how to survive on her own: one, that following the laws didn't necessarily mean that she was safe, just that she was invisible, which could be both good and bad. And, if she was smart about it, she could get away with nearly anything, as long as she never got caught.

She shrugs at Peeta and smiles a little in amusement at his reaction.

"So. You're the one Haymitch was talking about. Taking over where I left off, huh?," Ripper says, stirring her tea with a spoon. She had offered tea to Peeta, but not to her.

Katniss nods and Ripper narrows her eyes.

"Do you know why I got rid of my set-up, girl?"

"It got too dangerous," she answers.

Ripper purses her lips and hums.

"It's not in very good taste to steal another woman's business."

"I know."

"Do you know how to put the still together? How to brew?"

"Thirty percent, and you help me."

"Fifty, and the still is at your house, not off in the woods."

"Forty, and we'll throw in two loaves of bread a week," Peeta interrupts.

Katniss shoots him an exasperated look, but Ripper seems intrigued by Peeta's offer. Her hard eyes sweep over him and she chews contemplatively on her pipe, her molars clattering against it loudly.

"Who are you, merchant boy?"

"I'm the baker."

Ripper laughs long and deep, her stomach quaking as she leans forward and puts her hands on her knees, and her pip clutched tightly between her teeth.

"Let me guess- Abernathy sent you."

Peeta nods, shooting Katniss a confused look.

"Always had a thing for your father, boy. Anyone ever tell you that you look just like him? I'll take your offer, but only if _you'll_ be making the bread deliveries," says Ripper with a wink.

Katniss looks on in shock as Peeta blushes all the way up to the roots of his hair. Ripper starts laughing all over again before she extends her hand, pulling the pipe out of her mouth and wiping her eyes with a yellow, tobacco-stained index finger.

"What do you think, Baker? Do we have a deal?"

Peeta takes her hand with only a split second of hesitation and shakes once.

Ripper then describes what parts to pull out of the scrap yard and how to fit them together, and it takes them a while to figure out exactly what she's talking about because neither one of them have even seen a still, let alone know what parts make it up. That's when Peeta pulls out a book from his pocket, obviously handmade from scraps of paper, and begins to sketch what Ripper describes onto the mismatched pages. He's very good at sketching, and Katniss realizes as she watches him work that she'd seen him do this before, but she hadn't known what he was doing. In fact, she remembered him doing something like this quite often, when she felt the heavy weight of a gaze watching her and she had looked up just in time to see his eyes flicker away from her. _Had Peeta been drawing her? _

_That didn't make any sense._

As Peeta works, Ripper winks at her over his head and Katniss fumes silently until between the two of them, they've assembled a working schematic. Katniss makes sure to usher Peeta out of the kitchen first before shooting Ripper a caustic glare over her shoulder. Ripper is completely unfazed.

"He's cute, girl. You should keep him," she says with a crocodilian smile. Katniss tries, and fails, not to slam the door on her way out.

* * *

Later, they make their way through the back alleys of the Seam toward the mines, where the junkyard lies tucked away in a copse of trees next to the slag heap. The smell of oil and burning wood is heavy in the air, made all the more pungent by how clean and wet the air had been since the snow started earlier that morning. She's wearing her pants, which are still too small, but are at least marginally more practical for rooting around in the junkyard after dark. As a precaution, she brings along her knife too, stashed safely away in her pants pocket.

They slink along the dark path that leads toward the mines, and a familiar coldness builds in her hands as they pass the dark hole in the side of the earth that leads deep into the earth.

"Are you cold?," Peeta whispers.

"No. I'm fine," she answers.

"Are you sure? Your hands are shaking."

She tucks them into her pockets.

"I'm fine."

The scrap yard rises before them, a padlock looped around the handles of the door. There's only one way in, and that's over the fence. Katniss swings herself up pretty easily, maneuvers around the barbed wire that curls around the top, but Peeta takes a long time to get himself up, and makes so much noise that she's ready to bolt long before he thuds to ground next to her.

"Could you have been any louder?," she hisses.

"Sorry," he murmurs, frowning a little.

He brings out his little book, and together they sift through what looks to be the most recent additions to the scrap yard for the appropriates pieces. Luckily, the yard is lit by enormous flood lights, even at night, and they have no trouble locating the larger parts: a giant drum for brewing, a much smaller drum to collect the alcohol, and a long, curved pipe to connect the two. The other parts are smaller and take them significantly longer to dig up, but they manage to cobble everything together long before midnight.

They're just organizing how to carry everything back when they hear the gate rattling and voices drifting towards them.

"Katniss-go," Peeta says hurriedly. "Go. We have to run!"

She's struck suddenly by a memory of a voice wreathed in smoke and fire . It had echoed her ears as the world around her grew silent and still, and a liquid darkness crept in before swallowing her completely. Had it been in her own mind that she had heard it? Or had it been real?

"Katniss- c'mon!"

He tugs her up and they run toward the copse of tree at the very edge of the back of the yard. The gate swings open on rusty hinges behind them, and she can just make out a male voice calling out into the yard.

"If anyone is here, come out now!"

She runs faster than she ever has before, feet beating the earth as she ducks and dodges the jagged edges of scrap metal that jut out of the piles of junk, not pausing for breath until she's tucked safely behind a tree as far back into the yard as she can get. Its then that she remembers Peeta, and pokes her head out to see where he is.

There's a moment where she can't see him in the fathomless dark. All she sees are the moonlit outlines of the trees and plants immediately around her. She can hear him though, crashing through the brush, and she desperately hopes the peacekeepers are far enough away that they don't hear him too. After a tense few seconds he finally emerges and runs head on towards her hiding spot, nearly passing it in his clumsy haste. At the last second, she catches his wrist and yanks him toward her until there's barely a hair between them, and his hands crash on either side of her head against the tree.

"It's better if they find us like this," she murmurs between heaving breaths. "You know, like we got lost on our way to the slag heap."

This wouldn't be the first time kids had snuck into the scrap yard when the slag heap had been occupied, and rumors that they had snuck off together could only help their case anyway.

He nods mutely, eyes wide, as her heart hammers in her chest. Sweat prickles her neck and forehead, but she doesn't know whether its his proximity or her desperate sprint that causes it.

Beams of light flash dizzyingly through the yard, illuminating piles of scrap metal and the wiry trees that tower over them. Its still snowing, and pinprick snowflakes dance around them in dreamy gusts, catching in their hair and on their jackets. Her breath comes quick but steady as her gaze drifts from over Peeta's shoulder to his face.

He's watching her, and as their eyes meet she watches his pupils dilate, fat and black against thin rings of wet blue. He blinks.

His eyelashes are completely bewildering. How had she not noticed them before? They're so long it's incredible they don't tangle every time he closes his eyes, and she spies a daring few snowflakes have perched on their ends.

Voices echo around the yard indistinguishable from one another. A flashlight beam sears a tree a few feet to their right, and she can feel him suck in a quick breath.

The voices are a scant few feet away, and as the peacekeepers search. Her eyes screw shut, hands fisting in Peeta's jacket. The bottom of her stomach drops out as a branch snaps directly behind them, and a man's voice booms out through the darkness.

"Clear!"

A round of other 'clears' echo back. His booted footsteps punctuate his statement by moving back toward the main part of the yard.

"We're ok," Peeta whispers. "We're ok. They're leaving."

She opens her eyes and unknots her hands from Peeta's jacket. A shaking sigh of relief escapes her. Peeta pokes his head out to peer around the tree.

"Ok, they're definitely leaving."

Peeta makes them wait until the Peacekeepers are long gone before they emerge from behind the tree.

"I always hated the hiding part of hide and seek," she mutters, stepping over a thick pipe.

"But I'll bet you were a great seeker," he says.

She smirks.

"I was."

They pick their way through the trees to where they had abandoned the parts for the still. The larger drum is made of metal, but its hollow, and Peeta easily throws it over his shoulder, like it weighs no more than a sack of flour, and grabs the pipe as well. Katniss heaves the other smaller drum over her shoulder, stuffs the other parts in her jacket pockets, and they make their way through the precarious heaps of scrap metal that surround them. Jumping the fence this time is tricky, as they both have to climb one handed, but somehow they manage it with only minimally more noise than before, and take off down a shortcut through the woods back towards the Seam without looking back. If the Peacekeepers hear them scale the fence a second time, they certainly don't come running to try to catch them.

It's lucky that the snow picks up, because by the time they're making their way towards Katniss' tiny house she realizes they hadn't even thought about how to get the parts into her home without being seen.

She really had no reason to worry, however. Its so dark and snowy that even if someone were to look out their windows, they wouldn't be sure of what they saw. She and Peeta are just two dark shadows drifting silently through the night.

Peeta is quiet and distracted on the walk back to her house, his free hand tucked deeply in his pocket. She pretends not to notice.

They tromp up the steps to her porch, tapping their boots against the posts to rattle out the snow that collected in their treads. As he sets the drum down carefully, she observes the look of concentration on his face.

Whether or not she wanted to be, she was in this with him now. There were people depending on her for survival, and she can't afford to slip up. All the same, it could be much, much worse. Peeta had proven his strength over and over, but she's more grateful for it now more than ever. She can trust him. He won't let her down.

She feels that thing again- that warm fluttering in her stomach. Butter was something she had only tried once, back when her father was still alive, but somehow this feels how she remembered butter tasted- slippery, smooth and warm.

He looks up and frowns slightly.

"Katniss, is there a squirrel hanging from your door?"

"Yeah... do you want it?"

_Problem solved._

* * *

**_A/N: Anything good that happened in this chapter is because of my beautifully talented beta Opaque! _**

_Thanks to all my lovely reviewers from last chapter, and all my silent readers as well! I see you lurking in my stats and it brings me joy ;)_

_To all my regular reviewers who are here every chapter, a special thank you to goes out to you and all you've done for my poor insecure soul. I am always excited to see what you'll have to say about the new chapter, and have read every one of your reviews. __**You guys are seriously the best!**_

_See you all next week!_


	8. Color, Composition and Space

_**viii.**_

* * *

The snow is falling in heavy clumps as Katniss stares out her soot streaked kitchen window onto the porch and the street beyond. An amorphorous cloud on the glass balloons and contracts in sync with her breathing, and she's momentarily distracted by the way its edges creep rhythmically back and forth.

Prim doesn't remember that at this time five years ago they were nearly starving, but she does. Katniss lists all the things they have now that they didn't then- money, food, coal… her eyes slip to her sister's feet underneath the table and she adds Prim's new boots, which she was proud to pay outright for with the money she saved up from the bakery. It had nearly wiped out what she saved, but there was no way around it. Prim needed new boots, and this time around there were no hand-me-downs because Katniss had worn through the tread on her old ones.

New boots weren't something she herself had ever had, but buying them for Prim made it feel as if they were hers anyway. Prim adored them too, and Katniss felt absolutely swollen with warmth the first morning Prim had worn them to school.

It's just her and Prim now, but they're going to be just fine.

Her headaches are even gone, for the most part. As for her seizures, though, there was no telling what would happen. No way to know when they were coming, no way to know if they were over… the only way to track them would be to actually have another one, and though she had very little idea of what they were besides black spaces in her mind, she knew that whatever they were doing to her, it couldn't be good.

She watches the fog on the window as it stills.

"Don't mind Katniss. She's just spacey today," Prim whispers dramatically from behind her.

"Who's being spacey?" she says as she turns around. Rory, who's sitting at the table with Prim, grins and shakes his head.

"You are. Did you even hear what Rory asked you? Or is that snow piling up in your head too?" Prim laughs.

"I am not being spacey," she mutters. "What did Rory ask?"

"He wanted to know what we were doing for your birthday."

"Nothing."

"Aw, Katniss, c'mon. You never do anything on your birthday."

"Ok. I'll spend all day in bed- alone. I'll sleep- all day. No one will talk to me, or ask me to do anything. And then I can wait another year and do it all over again."

Rory and Prim share a significant glance over their steaming mugs of tea, as if saying to one another "Of course that's what she wants to do."

Katniss rolls her eyes and turns back to look out the window again.

"Anything interesting going on out there?" Rory needles with a snicker.

"She's waiting for Peeta."

"Isn't that her boss?"

"Yeah. They're going to check on stuff."

Katniss rubs the bridge of her nose.

"Prim. Don't talk about-"

A knock on the front door interrupts them. Katniss points a finger at Prim in warning.

"I mean it. Not a word."

"Ok, ok. I get it. Answer the door already."

She tugs open the door and for a moment, she's too stunned to say anything. Gale stands on her porch, hands tucked into his jacket and eyes trained to the left of her face, acting for all the world as if the kiss and fight, never happened.

"Hey. Ma wants Rory home."

She moves aside and jerks her head in Gale's direction as she looks at Rory.

Rory purses his lips and quickly throws his pack over his shoulder, stumbling slightly as he leaps out of his chair.

"See ya Prim," he mumbles quietly, and rushes out of the house.

Katniss watches as Rory leaves with Gale impassively, then closes the door with a determined snap before Gale can say anything else.

"I hate that you're fighting," grumbles Prim. "Rory is so awkward about it, and I miss everybody." By everybody, she means Hazel, Posy and Vick. Katniss sighs as she clears Rory's mug from the table and puts it in the sink.

"Is it because of what happened with Madge?" Prim asks, and Katniss jerks her arm as she scrubs the mug with much more force than is necessary. How did Prim know about that?

"Drop it Prim."

"Ok, jeez. Then come sit down- your tea is getting cold."

* * *

As November comes to a blustery close, Delly decides that Katniss is more bark than bite and takes up residence in Madge's abandoned chair at the lunch table. Unsure of what exactly to do about this, Katniss reluctantly allows her to. There's a lovely consolation prize in that Delly seems to hate cheese, but love sharing, so Katniss finds it a little hard to turn down her company even when she insists on talking non-stop.

There's a strangeness to their relationship that even Katniss can feel. She's not sure if its because what brought them together is someone who is almost never present during their interactions, or if it is because whenever Delly talks about him she feels her stomach tighten and twist hotly. Whatever the case, Delly seems to catch on quickly that Katniss doesn't really like discussing Peeta, so she studiously avoids bringing him up.

That doesn't mean Katniss doesn't think about him when she is with Delly.

Delly and Peeta are very close. In what way, she can't entirely understand, because on the one hand, they still spend a lot of time together, but on the other, Delly doesn't seem to mind Katniss' presence in the bakery, or her 'engagement' to Peeta. If anything, it seems to make her more enthusiastic about Katniss. Once again, Katniss got the distinct impression that there is something she is missing.

The last day of November sees her mulling this over as Delly rattles on about something she only half listens to. Gnawing on her bread pensively, she completely misses the fight brewing on the other side of the cafeteria until punches are being thrown.

"Oh," Delly says. "What do you think is going on?"

Katniss shrugs. Whatever it is, getting involved would be a mistake. Out of habit, her eyes flicker over to where Gale and Madge are sitting. They are oblivious to her as they watch the fight.

People mill around uselessly as peacekeepers file in and shove their way to the front.

Standing suddenly, she grabs Delly's arm.

"Time to get out of here," she mutters.

Delly is about to follow her when another girl rushes by them, a gush of dark blood leaking freely from her nose down her face. Delly seems to freeze as her eyes follow the gore, and her hands rises to cup her mouth. Katniss recognizes the girl behind the blood- its a Seam girl Gale's age named Thistle, and it looks like she's been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Exactly what Katniss is trying to avoid.

Thistle is tall, and though not immediately pretty, has a way about her that suggests that she is. Her eyes always seemed to be laughing at a joke only she knew, and the perpetual wry twist to her lips implies the joke was about you. Her hair was long and black, and she let it fall in a loose sheet around her shoulders. She was popular among young men from the Seam, probably more than anything because she had a wicked sense of humor and spent a lot of time leaning against buildings or standing on street corners with them.

"We should help her," Delly says breathlessly. "That looks broken."

"Go ahead if you want," says Katniss with a slight frown. She hadn't known they were friends.

Like Katniss, Thistle had found an illegal source of income early in her life, and was reaping the rewards of cornering an abandoned part of the black market in Twelve. If you needed liquor or meat, you looked for Katniss. If you needed a tattoo, you looked for Thistle. Her mother had passed on giving birth to her, and her father was miner, so more often than not, Thistle had the run of the house. It was there that with a collection of handmade dyes and sewing needles, she set in skin whatever crude design was brought to her.

Though Katniss understood the necessity of doing whatever you could to keep food on the table, probably a little better than most, she felt weak kneed at the idea of doing what Thistle did. Something about it seemed unclean, and dangerous in a more insidious way than poaching.

She wonders how Delly and Thistle know each other, and whether or not Delly is aware of how Thistle makes her living.

"C'mon Katniss, you know more about this than I do."

Katniss trails after Delly with a scowl set on her face.

"No. Not really."

"But your mother-"

"I'm not as good as she was."

"Well, you'll be better than I am. C'mon."

They follow the trail of blood that dots the hallway floor to the bathroom, where they find Thistle leaning over the sink. Katniss quickly averts her eyes from the splatter of red collecting in the cracked, white porcelain.

"Um, Thistle?" says Delly softly, "Are you ok?"

Thistle looks up from the sink, blood leaking over her mouth and down her chin.

"Peachy keen," she says, a weird nasal tone in her voice. Delly moves toward her cautiously.

"Do you want any help?"

"No. Obviously this is under control," Thistle mumbles angrily.

Thistle looks back down at the sanguine mess in the sink and turns the tap on. Katniss tears her eyes away again and looks up at the ceiling. She's never liked blood- not its unmistakable scent, so heavy you can taste it in the back of your throat, and especially not the way it looks as it oozes out of an injury.

"Katniss... do you think its broken?" Delly asks nervously.

She jerks her eyes down from the mold on the ceiling to Thistle's rapidly swelling nose. Moving closer cautiously, she does her best to visually check for a break. The skin is too puffy and dark to tell. Suddenly, she's light-headed. A little dizzy.

"You'll need to wait and see," she mumbles. "Too swollen right now."

"You ok, Katniss? You look a little pale-"

"I have to go."

She rushes out of the tiny bathroom and leans her back against the wall. Breathing steadily, she lets her head drop back against the cool, rough surface behind her and closes her eyes.

Delly doesn't follow her. She doesn't see her for the rest of the day.

She does, unfortunately, see Haymitch. He'd promised to help her navigate the murky waters of an engagement she's barely been able to fake. She, Peeta and Haymitch sit down in the back of the bakery after they close and discuss their options. Peeta and Haymitch talk strategy, she tries not to look as bored as she feels. Its quickly decided that Peeta doesn't really need much coaching- its her that's the problem.

They run through a few ideas of what kind of 'in love' she could be, but none of them really seem to fit. Flirtatious is shot down immediately. She's not dreamily happy either, nor is she cuddly (Haymitch scoffs), shy (Peeta snorts), or passionate (she rolls her eyes). She's not really anything, and her acting skills are not up to the challenge of convincing a seasoned head peacekeeper. Haymitch throws the towel in after nearly an hour, taking a deep swig out of his flask and pushing his chair back from the table.

"That's it," he says. "Just do your best not to fuck it up too badly."

He staggers out the door and she grinds her teeth.

"You know," says Peeta slowly. "You could just let me handle it."

She looks up at him.

"You mean you'll do all that stuff on your own… and I'll what? Sit there?"

"You just be you, and I'll work around it."

She considers this. There are girls from the Seam, and some Merchant class as well, for whom these types of things come naturally. May even be enjoyable. But she's not one of them. It's not even like she has been very observant of how these things were meant to play out. Once again, she reaches back through her memories to her parents, and a hurt so raw flashes through her that she immediately decides that Peeta is right.

Its just better if he takes care of it. He'll know what to do to make it seem as if she were equally involved. He won't let her down.

She nods, and then, impulsively, reaches across the table to touch his hand, just as she had tried to before, when Peeta had jumped and ruined it all in front of Thread. His skin is warm under hers. Something buttery and curious flutters in her stomach and then disappears.

"Thanks," she says, and pulls her hand away.

In the days that follow, she has to get used to that strange feeling, because Peeta touches her more and usually her first instinct is to jerk away. But she can't do that.

He knows not to push it. Hands, arms, shoulders. That's all. Once, her waist when she leaned into his side in front of a store full of customers. It's casual, with just the right balance of cozy and suggestive. She had been right, Peeta is good at this. She had no chance of pulling off lovesick young bride-to-be, but Peeta figures out how to make people love her, just as he is pretending to.

Their big moment comes by accident. She had been measuring out a flour mixture and had been caught up with keeping all the numbers straight. Since Peeta let her start doing the books on her own, he and Katniss had figured out the right mix of flours to continue to augment the nutrition of the tesserae until their extra funds from the liquor could cover the difference. In the mean time, the mix of flours was complicated, and they couldn't afford to get the proportions wrong. She was so focused on her task, she didn't realize she had put her hands on her hips, leaving white hand prints behind.

Thread comes that afternoon to check their books, and she's so nervous that she's going to mess up as badly as Haymitch predicted that the moment he enters the kitchen she bustles to the front room, leaving Peeta all on his own. Wallowing in her own cowardice, she makes up silly things to do to seem busy while Peeta talks to Thread. When he's gone, Peeta bursts into the front of the shop, and for a moment, she thinks he's angry at her for leaving him alone. But he grins broadly and shakes his head.

"Brilliant, Katniss!" he says, "How did you think of that?"

"Think of what?" she asks.

He motions to the flour prints of hands on her waist. Her eyes flash to his hands, covered in flour from rolling out an extra batch of dough to put in the oven the next morning. Her own hands are clean.

She had been embarrassed and flustered, and of course Thread had connected dots that she had drawn completely unwittingly. Too relieved to be embarrassed, she shakes her head.

"It was an accident," she says. "I didn't mean to do that, I just was just so focused on what I was doing. I didn't even notice until now."

"Accident or not, you nailed it."

"I think we found what kind of 'in love' I am," she teases with a smirk, "Oblivious."

* * *

December dawns light and airy, with a reprieve from the snowstorms that have drifted languidly over the district. It's the kind of weather she likes- cold without cutting to the bone, with a bluish wintery glow cast by meek sunlight. It's been over a month since her last headache, and even though in the past, changing weather meant skull-splitting migraines, she's remained miraculously pain free.

With her favorite weather comes dense brown bread from the bakery, which she adores. They have enough money to buy mink oil for their boots and pants for her. Admittedly, the pants aren't exactly new, just gently worn. The inside of the thighs have been rubbed thin, and the pockets were impractically small, but she could make do. It's Delly who provides a solution in the end. She trades Katniss a lesson in what she knows about medicine for a some leather scraps to patch up her pants. It's a bad trade on Delly's end, but Katniss makes sure that she knows how limited her knowledge is and Delly still insisted.

Katniss uses the leather and a special needle Delly loans her to patch the insides of the thighs and knees, and then she fashions some external pockets with what's result is practical, if a little rough, and she rather likes the pants once they've been finished.

More gifts come leading up to her actual birthday. A metal tea strainer from Prim. A pair of stockings from Hazel. Even Darius the peacekeeper has something for her- an automatic flint he calls a 'lighter'. Its unbelievably thoughtful of him, so much so that she is momentarily taken aback. She'd hasn't even seen him since the Hob shut down.

The night before her birthday Gale shows up, and she's filled with anger and a smug happiness all at once. Angry because he still has yet to apologize, and happy because she had thought he might forget her birthday entirely, and as upset with him as she was, there was a desperate, deep part of her that had wanted him to come to her in spite of everything. He doesn't say much of anything to her, and what he does say is forced. She can feel hurt radiating off him like heat from coals.

'Good,' she thinks.

"Here," he says, thrusting a cloth wrapped bundle at her. She goes to open it, but he stops her.

"Later, ok?" he says, "Wait until you're inside."

She nods.

And then he's gone before she can say anything else. It's good that he told her to wait. Good that she listened. As she unwraps the package, the scent of cedar and tallow fills the room. She'd know that scent anywhere, and she can't believe what she's seeing as the wrappings fall away.

Gale has made her a bow.

It's a little rough. Not as refined in terms of craftsmanship as her father's had been. But she couldn't turn her nose up at something Gale had made just for her.

So that was what he was working on this whole time from the cedar branch he dragged back months ago. Its unbelievable the planning that went into this- no wonder he had risked coming to see her. He had put so much time into making this. Had risked so much. All to give her a bow she may never get to use.

Suddenly unbearably guilty, her fingers clench the cloth that had covered Gale's gift. She quickly rewraps it and shoves it under a sweater in her mother's dresser. She needs time to think about this. Time to formulate what it means, both for her friendship with Gale, and her future ability secure a little more money.

Despite this, her heart soars in giddy anticipation of when she can sneak away to test it out.

Her actual birthday is uneventful. She spends the day in bed just as she had threatened to do, nibbling on bread and making half-hearted attempts at knitting something with the wool and needles that had once belonged to her mother. Prim sits in bed with her, and between the two of them they manage to cobble together a loose rectangle. They laugh both at how terrible it is and take it out, starting all over.

They only put pants on when they leave bed to make dinner, and they're cleaning off the table when a knock sounds at the front door. It's Peeta.

"Someone told me it was your birthday," he says.

"It was me," Prim whispers loudly. Katniss shoots her a glare, but Prim just chuckles and sticks her tongue out.

She stands to the side to let Peeta inside with a gust of swirling snow and frigid air. Pulling her sweater closed over her chest, she crosses her arms tightly as Peeta withdraws a wrapped package from his jacket.

"Prim said you didn't want anything, but I couldn't resist."

He sets the package down on the table and unwraps it as she purses her lips.

"You really didn't have to," she grumbles, and picks at her sweater uncomfortably. She glances out the window and notes with some irritation that the ground is covered in several inches of snow. Peeta has trecked all the way out to the Seam because of Prim.

She glares at Prim, who ignores her entirely. As she does, she can hear Peeta unwrapping the package on the table. Katniss watches Prim's face change from mildly curious to shock. She quickly shifts her gaze to the table, where Peeta's gift to her has been removed from its heavy brown paper wrappings.

Two small roses, one a creamy pinkish white, the second a deep red, lay nestled in tiny aluminium cups. Where had Peeta found roses in winter?

Stepping forward instinctively, she realizes the roses are set in pie crusts. Did he expect her to eat a flower? Her heart stutters when she smells baked apple and realizes they aren't flowers at all, but artfully shaped apple tarts. The petals were made of thin slices of apple and coated in sugar and spices which were then layered concentrically, one around the other, until a rose was formed. The pinkish skin of the apple had been left on, creating a startling realism in that the very tips of the petals were rosier than the rest.

"Peeta," she breathes, and her eyes widen. "These are-"

"Oh my god Peeta, did you make those?" cries Prim.

Peeta gives a little shrug and smiles. Katniss drifts back from the table and watches her sister as she fawns over the little desserts. The cream colored one is for apparently for Prim, and she coos happily as Peeta gives it to her. It's no bigger than the palm of her hand.

The red one must be hers.

Its tiny. It isn't anything, in the scope of things he has done for her.

But it feels different.

She swallows. The strange unreality that washes over her is something she has felt once before. She was high in a tree, balanced on a delicate branch as it swayed in the breeze. Twenty feet in the air, maybe thirty... she can't remember, she had just climbed up until she couldn't anymore, and her hands and feet were sweating and cold.

The snapping of the branch had affected her viscerally, and as her body fell through space, she felt it: the racing pulse, the sudden emptiness in her chest, a terrifying weightlessness...

And underneath it all, that melting, that warmth she had only felt a few times before, and always because of Peeta.

"Katniss?"

She looks up to find Peeta watching her worriedly.

Prim rolls her eyes, but her lips twitch into a smirk.

"Don't worry. She's just spacing out. She's been doing that a lot lately." Prim takes her pastry and flounces over to the couch in front of the fireplace, tugging a ratty quilt around her shoulders as she goes.

Katniss is quiet for a moment, eyes flickering between the table and Peeta.

"I can't eat that," she rasps.

Peeta's smile twitches and he looks down at his hands and then back at the table. Guilt hits her like a brick to the skull. There's a puzzle in his expression and the pieces are all there to solve it, but she's not sure how exactly they slot together. The picture they're supposed to make is too unfamiliar.

She's been silent too long. He's waiting for an explanation, but he could wait all his life and she'd still never know what she meant.

"Its beautiful," she mutters. "I've never even.."

Peeta stills, before picking up the pastry. Her boots are the safest thing in the room to stare at, so she does that.

"Here," he says, grabbing her palm and placing the little tart in it. "I made it for you. So, eat it or not, it's yours."

It's still warm.

The deep rubine petals bloom so vividly that if it weren't for its sweet, spicy scent she never would have guessed it was even food. How had he managed to get this color? Of all colors to reproduce with or without Capitol grade dyes, a dark red is the hardest to achieve, and yet somehow Peeta has done it.

"I can't take the credit for the color," he says, as if reading her mind. "It's just beet juice. Delly's idea."

She touches one of the petals with a curious finger. Its nearly paper thin, just like a real petal would be.

How could she bare to eat this? Why would he give her the kind of present that would only disappear, one way or another? What if she had wanted to keep it?

"Katniss," says Peeta softly. "It's just a pastry. I could make this any day."

When it's put like that, her decision is easier. They wrap themselves in their coats and sit on the edge of her back porch with steaming cups of tea, swinging their legs idly and watching the snow fall.

She nibbles at it slowly, dreading the moment its finally finished.

* * *

**A/N:** Ok, I know Katniss' birthday isn't in December, but its her cannon birthday today. So oops. This universe is extra alternate.

**Special thanks to the ever lovely Opaque, who is my fantastic beta and the only reason this story has gotten as far as it has. And a huge thank you to my reviewers as well! You guys are the sweetest- really. I so look forward to hearing from you every week!**

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but if you're interested in outtakes and previews, come find me on tumblr (check my profile for the link). I usually post something twice a week. I also have previews up for the newest installment for the 'Without' series, titled 'Home is in Your Skin', which is tentatively slated for June :)

**See you next week!**


	9. Chances

_**ix.**_

* * *

"_In Panem We Trust" _the poster reads. Katniss frowns, eyes sweeping left, then right, as she walks through the Seam in the shadowy twilight. It was one of many that had gone up overnight after the first week of December, blazing red and gold on houses, street corners and the electricity poles that supplied (intermittent) power across Twelve.

Tugging her coat closed over her chest with one hand, she dips her head down and focuses on the road in front of her. No good will come of looking around too much.

Her other hand is wrapped around the edge of a basket of laundry, which she has perched on her hip as she makes her way to Ripper's house. Peeta's already waiting by the time she gets there, his arms crossed over his chest as he leans against a rotted fence post.

He grins slowly as she approaches and his arms fall by his side.

"Hey you," he says, and tucks a piece of her hair that has fallen out of her braid behind her ear. "How was your trip?"

No matter how many times he does this, she always has to remind herself that its just for show.

It's not for her. Its for anyone who is watching.

"Fine," she says. "Let's go."

They ascend the steps to Ripper's door and just as they knock she swings the door wide open and urges them inside with an impatient wave of her hand.

"You're late. What took so long?" she grunts with a frown.

Katniss' eyes flick around the house before she mutters her reply.

"Peacekeepers."

Ripper's frown deepens, and her brows knit together. Katniss sets the laundry basket down with a heavy thunk on the kitchen table and Ripper wastes no time in pushing aside the clothing to reveal twelve mason jars full of clear liquid.

"This all?" she asks.

"No," Katniss answers, "There'll be more by tomorrow."

Ripper grabs a jar and unscrews a lid, bringing the mouth of the jar to her nose. She breathes in deeply and her eyes squinch tight.

Katniss turns to roll her eyes at Peeta.

"Girl, you keep rolling those eyes and they'll spin right out of your head," Ripper snaps without opening her eyes.

Peeta snickers. After their initial interaction, he had developed an annoyingly saccharine rapport with Ripper, proving once and for all to Katniss that he had the ability to charm literally anyone.

Ripper smirks in self satisfaction and her eyes fly open.

"Good. Better this time," she mutters and screws the lid back on. "You're all set to go. Twelve houses tonight, can you make that before the curfew?"

The curfew is also new. Twelve has never had one that Katniss can remember, but Ripper assures her that it has happened before. It was set for 10pm, just three short hours after the mines let out. The whole exercise seemed pointless- most people were tucked safely away at home after 8pm anyway. It was too cold out, and most Seam residents were either too exhausted from the mines or child care to want to parade around the streets after dark. It seemed to Katniss that it was more about power than control.

"It'll be tight," she says, scratching her cheek. "I think we'll make it though."

Ripper nods distractedly, tucking the bottle back underneath the clothes in the basket.

"Don't you keep that boy out late," she says, "You hear me? I don't want you getting him into trouble."

"Hey now," Peeta says with a laugh, "How do you know it's not me getting _her_ into trouble?"

Ripper smirks at him.

"You wouldn't do a girl wrong, would you Peeta Mellark?"

"Never," he says cheekily. "Been known to keep one waiting though…"

Ripper laughs deeply.

"Go on, get out, get out. You two got bootleg to shake."

* * *

School lets out for winter break, and Katniss promises Delly she'll make time to see her. Of course, she has no real intention of doing so. Delly has gotten smart though, and finds her at the bakery on only their second day off. It's late afternoon when she pops in, the shop already bathed in the weak orange glow of a winter twilight.

"Hey you! Long time no see!" she says with a wink at Katniss as she slips behind the counter.

Before Katniss can push her away, she's enveloped her in a quick, but warm, hug.

"You were never going to visit me, were you?"

Katniss shrugs, but smirks a little.

"I would have tried," she fibs.

Delly snorts.

"That is definitely a lie. Has anyone ever told you what a bad liar you are? You get this tight little smile like you think no one can tell-"

"Delly!" Peeta interrupts as he pops his head into the store, "I thought I heard you. What are you doing here?"

Delly bounces past Katniss and wraps Peeta in a hug as well. Katniss glances down at the counter as she fists the dishrag in her hand.

"Hey Peeta," she says, "Oooh, I missed you. I never get to see you anymore."

Peeta rubs the back of his neck.

"Been busy here, Dell."

"You're a liar too, Peeta Mellark. How hard could it possibly be, running a bakery on you own?" she admonishes with a giggle.

Peeta laughs.

"Obviously not hard enough to satisfy you."

"And nothing ever will be," she sings.

They disappear into the back room, only for Delly to pop her head out a moment later.

"Well, don't stay out here alone. Come on, nobody wants bread bad enough to brave this cold!"

It turns out that Delly is right, and the three of them spend the afternoon in the kitchen, idly picking at day-olds and chatting. Thistle is Delly's newest friend and, much to Katniss' irritation, seems to be all she can talk about.

"Was she like this with me?" she mutters to Peeta, and he chokes on the bread he is swallowing.

He shakes his head vigorously and says, "No."

Delly drops her gaze to her hands and picks at her nails nervously.

"Alright," she says, flustered. "So I'm a little enthusiastic about a new friend. What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing," says Katniss. "You're just very... excited. More than usual, I mean."

"Delly's just friendly," says Peeta smoothly. "I think we can finish the rye. It doesn't sell as well as on the second day."

He gets up and cuts a loaf of rye in half, then into smaller slices, before laying it out on the table. A sudden crack and muffled scream from outside makes the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. Her head whips toward the kitchen door, propped open to offset the dissipating heat from the ovens, where the sound had leaked in.

"What was that?" Delly breathes.

More sounds drift in- people talking in low voices and moving with hurried footsteps.

"I don't know," Katniss says.

Peeta has a strange look on his face- like an anxious sort of wince- but it melts away quickly as he moves to close the door.

"Something's probably going on in the square."

"Should we go see?" Delly asks.

"No," says Katniss, "We shouldn't."

She and Peeta share a look.

"So how's Thistle's nose?" he says without skipping a beat. "You never finished telling us what happened."

Delly sighs dramatically and rolls her eyes.

"Well, turns out it wasbroken in the end, but I think she's _actually enjoying_ the whole situation. She has this strange bump now, and her eyes are still both black, but its like she's weirdly proud of it or something."

Katniss stays later than she means to, too drowsy and heavy from eating all afternoon to keep track of the time. Delly gripes about having to go back out into the cold, so Peeta makes her spicy cinnamon tea to keep her warm on the walk. He gives a mug of it to Katniss as well after Delly heads out, but it only serves to make her more reluctant to finally leave.

When she tells him this with a sleepy glare and all he does is laugh.

"I can go with you, if you want," he says. "But we'd better start out soon."

She turns down his offer to walk her, but he insists and the reminder that its getting late is what prompts her to finally bundle up. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose burn red as they step outside and set off into the night, but she's so sleepy and warm that it hardly matters. With the soft leather of her father's jacket wrapped around her, she's cozy despite the frigid temperatures.

Under the flickering lamplight, she and Peeta make their way down the street, the muffled crunch of their boots in the snow the only sounds to be heard. She's reminded, as they pass through the town square, of what they had heard earlier. The sharp crack, the muffled voices…

She doesn't know what it was that they had heard. She doesn't want to.

"It's cold," she mumbles, and tucks herself under his arm. Anyone could be watching.

"Yes, it is," he answers, his eyes flitting over to the post in the middle of the square.

* * *

That night when she gets home Prim tells her that Rory has a cold, and she makes up her mind to catch Gale alone Sunday morning before he slips through the fence. With the bakery closed and all their 'laundry' taken care of for the week, she finally has a day all to herself. She rises before dawn, dresses quickly and is at the fence earlier than she expects.

She doesn't wait for Gale long. He is almost never late, and is dependably nearing the fence just as the vibrant pink light of dawn fades.

Its feels like nothing has changed.

He does a double take when he sees her waiting and adjusts his bag over his shoulder with a frown.

"Hey," he says, eyes guarded. "What are you doing here?"

"Waiting."

"For?"

"You."

"Katniss," Gale says with a huff, "I'm not letting you go out there."

She shrugs and smirks.

"You couldn't stop me."

Its a dare.

Gale watches her impassively as she sweeps a tendril of hair behind her ear. In all likelihood, he could probably physically restrain her. Gale's legs are longer, and though his frame is quite large, he is unexpectedly nimble. He'd catch her in flash, but she'd fight him tooth and nail. It doesn't seem like he's even considering this, however. Gale's dark gaze is locked on her, as though he could pick her apart with his eyes alone.

"Besides, don't you want to see if I can still out shoot you?" she says.

He grins in spite of himself and looks down at his boots before staring out beyond the fence.

"Alright. But we stay close to the fence. And if you start to feel-"

Katniss rolls her eyes and slips through the fence easily.

"Yeah, alright. I get it. Come on."

Gale follows and jogs to catch up to her. They walk side by side as the snowy forest stretches out before them, framed by mountains whose tops disappear into the soupy clouds overhead. Katniss raises her hand to her forehead briefly in awe of how clear-headed she is despite the oncoming storm clouds.

"How's your head been?" Gale asks.

"Fine," she says. "Haven't had a headache in weeks."

"I told you, didn't I?" he says, gazing upwards at the snow covered boughs overhead as they enter the forest. "You'll be fine. You got this thing beat."

Warmth rushes through her and they make their way to a clearing in comfortable silence. A weight lifts from her chest as the clean, frozen air of the woods rushes into her lungs. In the weeks and months since her first seizure, she never considered how much she actually missed this place, but now, ankle deep in soft snow and dead leaves, she can feel it.

Or maybe she's just missed her best friend.

They stop at the far end of the clearing and Gale leans back against a tree, raising an eyebrow at her expectantly.

"Hop to it, Everdeen."

Tugging the bow out of her pack, she grins and notches an arrow. Suddenly, Gale is all business.

"Hold it there," he says, pushing off the tree to circle her. "I just want to see-"

He leans in close to inspect the various joints of the bow and tests the tensile strength of the string with a finger. Seemingly satisfied, he steps back and motions for her to continue.

_Steady._ She calms her breath, closes one eye and brings the bow up. _Aim._ What are the wind conditions? Where is her breath? _Focus. _The only thing that exists in the world is the tree in front of her and the tip of her arrow.

She lets the arrow fly and it thunks deep into the tree across the clearing. With a slight smirk, she turns to Gale and offers him the bow.

"How close you think you'll get to that? I'm guessing you'll be left by a few inches."

He laughs and takes it, notching and shooting off an arrow of his own. It lands six inches to the left of hers, just as she predicted. She laughs at the frown on his face.

"Little bit tight," he says inspecting the string of the bow. "That should fade with time. Hows it work for you?"

"Fine. You're just mad I can still kick your ass up and down this forest with just a bow and arrow."

"Is that a challenge?"

"Maybe it'll be for you. I'm sure I'll be fine."

Despite what Gale said about staying close to the fence, they go deep into the woods seeking progressively more difficult targets. They shoot a few squirrels, but only Katniss manages to get them through the eye. The steadily increasing weight of her game bag feels satisfying as it knocks against her hip.

Sometime around noon, judging by the position of the sun in the sky, they stop for a lunch of bread and goat cheese and Katniss jokes about cooking some of their fresh squirrel with her new lighter. The wood around them is too wet to light, and the only other thing they could potentially use to burn are pine needles, which smoke something awful.

Gale is fascinated by the lighter and is actually serious about using it to try to cook until he inspects it and by shaking it, reveals the secret of how it works. He holds the plastic body up to the sky, where the shadow of the liquid inside is revealed in the light.

"It's a flint combined with a highly flammable fuel source," he explains. "Pretty smart, actually. You don't need much force to start the flame like you would with a regular flint, because the fuel will basically combust when it hits the air. I'm guessing the stuff inside is butane."

"Thanks Professor Hawthorne," she drawls.

"_Ha ha._ Where'd you even get this?"

"You're not going to believe me. It was that red-headed peacekeeper."

Instead of being amused by this, Gale scowls.

"Why'd he do that?"

"Probably so you could give me lecture me about butane."

He is considerably less talkative after that, and they split up to forage for anything that might be growing under the snow like ramps or edible roots. When the air gets frigid and the sunlight wanes, they turn back.

"I missed you," Gale says suddenly.

"What is that supposed to mean?" she laughs. "It's not like I've gone anywhere."

Gale looks at her out of the corner of his eye and rubs his neck.

"Yeah. You did. You left."

She glares at her boots as they sink into the snow and, as they lift, reveal the brown-black rotted leaves beneath.

"It's your own fault," she says, her eyebrows cinching together, "What was I supposed to do?"

Gale's hands dive into his pockets and his mouth tightens.

"You could have stayed. Posy asks about you, you know."

"And what do you tell her? That me and Prim missed the view from our old house?"

"I told her the truth. That we got in a fight."

"That's not why I left and you know it."

"Well, what _should_ I have told her?" he says mockingly as he breaks a small icicle off a branch and inspects it sullenly.

"You didn't have to tell her anything if you were just going to lie."

"You're one to talk," he snorts.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It's not true, is it?" he says, "What they say about you and the baker kid?"

She glares out into the trees. There's some time yet before they reach the forest's edge. Her stomach twists as she tells him. No. It isn't true.

"Then why, wherever I go, do I hear about you and your _fiance_?"

Gale throws the icicle at a tree trunk. It snaps and falls to the ground where it disappears into the snow.

"You don't know. I never told you. Commander Thread would have killed me. Might have hurt Prim. Peeta saved all of us- more than once. I owe him my life, and so do you." She tells him the events of the past few months, starting with Peeta's black eye, and lets the story unravel from there. She tells him about the tesserae, what Peeta had to do to save her life, about Thread, and the deal she had to make with Haymitch Abernathy.

Gale's face darkens in anger.

"Nobody asked him to do it."

"Gale. All those tesserae we took. All those times our names will be in the Reaping bowl. It would have all been for nothing without him."

"We would have figured something out. That night- you didn't have to- If I had known what you-"

His eyes flash.

"I would have figured something out. I would have kept Rory from entering his name. Its not right that you're wrapped up in this because the baker forgot to pay attention in algebra. And it's not right, what he made you do."

"What does 'right' matter if we're all dead?"

He catches her arm and swings her around to face him.

"The rebellion- they knew too, about the tesserae. This isn't the first time the Capitol has done this, you know. They were working on a solution."

He tells her about what the rebels have been doing, how they've been organizing, but she doesn't want to hear it. All she can think of is how the Capitol will retaliate when they find out. If they had been willing to starve hundreds of people over a fire no one could prove wasn't accidental, what would they do when their mysterious rebel group becomes real people with names and families?

Her twisting stomach ties itself into a knot.

"You should join."

"Join what?"

"The rebellion."

"What will that do, Gale? Who will that help?"

"You, for starters."

"How? What is a rebellion _really_ going to do?"

"It'll give us a chance. It'll give _you_ a chance."

"A chance to what? Get killed?"

"A chance for anything!"

Gale is breathing heavily as he runs both of his hands through his hair and spins away from her.

"Don't you see what's happening?" he says, turning back to face her. "They're going to kill us! If things continue the way they are… it may not be today, or tomorrow, but if the Capital has their way, it'll be someday. The only thing we have left is to fight. It's the only way we'll _ever_ have a chance."

Gale is right. If its not today, it will be someday. The Capitol will have them all, in the end. What choice did they really have? They could die on their knees, or on their feet. Either way they are just as dead.

But when she thinks about what it would mean- for Prim, for Gale's family, for Peeta- if Commander Thread found out she was a part of the rebellion, her blood runs cold. Though she knew that rebels in Twelve existed, they had been shadowy, anonymous. They had never been real. Not to her. Thinking about them now, as people who confronted this same decision, gives her the biggest reason of all not to join.

They're people.

And people are corruptible. People can be stupid. People can be scared.

Any one of them can be persuaded to out the rest.

To trust any of them would be like handing herself over to the Commander Thread herself.

Without having to ask, she knows that Gale is now a part of it. He knows too much, and even if he hasn't outright admitted it, he as good as told her he was a member the moment he invited her to join.

But she can't tell him what she thinks. Not about the rebellion, and not about his idiocy in becoming part of it, because Gale would never accept that rebellion was tantamount to suicide. So, instead, she deflects the only way she knows how.

"I need to talk to Peeta first."

She's horrible to do this to him. To leave him without an answer. Gale is like she is, slow to like, and even slower to trust. He would not have asked her without thinking long and hard about it first, for all their years of friendship. And using Peeta as a barrier isn't right either. It's a coward's move.

"Why?," Gale snaps, "He got you into this whole mess in the first place."

"No, he didn't," she says.

Gale snorts and shakes his head.

"Unbelievable."

"What?"

"Did you ever think that this might be what he wanted?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Did you ask him?"

She looks at him blankly.

"Why would I do that?"

"Do it. Ask him."

"That's ridiculous. I'm not going to- and anyway, why would he _want_ to be forced to marry me?"

"You think I don't recognize the expression on his face when he looks at you?" Gale says as they break the edge of the forest. Ahead of them, the fence looms dark and stern.

"What are you talking about?"

Gale grabs her arm again, but she wrenches it out of his grasp and glares at him.

"Katniss," he says, stopping dead in his tracks. He stares at her in disbelief, his shoulders rising and his head turning slowly from side to side. "Are you completely blind? I'm _in love_ with you. And so is he."

Oh.

And, _Peeta is a fantastic actor._ She watches her breath rise and freeze in front of her face. It dissipates, and for a long minute, no more appears.

"But Madge-"

"-is a friend."

_Oh._

"Gale," she mumbles, the desperate edge of a plea in her voice. "You know how I feel. About that. And you."

His face tightens and he flushes, jerking back from her suddenly.

"And just what _do_ you feel, exactly?"

"I don't- I can't. Not right now, not with things the way they are. Not after the drought. All I can think about is how afraid I am- for myself, for Prim, for you and Hazel, and the kids… there's nothing left of me that I can give. To anyone."

"And if things were different?" he says.

"I don't know."

"_How could you not know?!"_

"Because I don't!"

Its not good enough for him. He wants an answer, but there isn't one. At least not one he'll accept. She doesn't know because they don't live a world where she can afford to think along those lines. And even if she could, it would all go wrong, because she was never going to get married, and she was never going to have children and its better that he be disappointed in her now than further on down the road. Loving her was useless and the sooner he realized that, the better.

They continue on. He's silent as they slip past the fence and through the trees, down towards the path that will lead them back to the Seam. Before they part, Gale mutters angrily: "You let me know when you figure it out."

And then he's gone, and all she's left with are a few dead squirrels and the terrifying feeling that the world is spinning too quickly for her to catch up to it.

* * *

_It's not real_.

After every touch, every fleeting smile, she has to remind herself. What they're doing- this game that they're playing- someone will lose. And odds are it won't be the Capitol.

There's too much at stake for her to falter. Gale had told her about the rebellion and their growing weapons stockpile. With Commander Thread's control cinching tighter day by day, she doesn't need Greasy Sae to tell her that another disaster is imminent. If the Capitol finds out, there will be nothing left of them but ashes.

Panic slips in and out of her awareness like passing flows of ice. Peeta's hand is around her waist as he talks amiably with a group of peacekeepers on the last morning left in December. A new year and a new Reaping, are just around the corner. She smiles at him and leans her head against his shoulder. Giddy unreality rushes through her.

If the rebellion is discovered, she knows as surely as she lives that Thread will point his finger at them. He won't need proof. All he'll need are his previous suspicions.

Peeta's hand brushes over her head, smoothing down her hair, and she feels it again- that feeling of falling through the air, faster and faster, the ground rising up to catch her…

There's no picking apart the reasons that she showed up at the Bakery the morning he told her to stay away. The surety she had in her actions then has faded as she realizes what the future likely holds.

She will marry him to save herself and everyone she loves. In doing so, she will lose Gale, because Peeta has played this game so well that he even has Gale fooled. But none of this will matter if she and Peeta can't keep Thread off the trail of what they are doing in the bakery.

And if the Capital catches wind of the Rebellion, they're all dead anyway.

_Do you know, Peeta? How much danger we're in?_

One of the peacekeepers is talking to her. She asks Katniss about how she and Peeta fell in love. Katniss laughs breathily in response.

"Oh, I don't know, exactly. It was after the fire, I think, when I didn't know what had happened to him or where he was and I realized I didn't know what it would do to me, if he had died. The next time I saw him- it just happened."

Peeta gallantly picks up the mess of her words and sweeps them under a story more eloquent than any she could have hoped for.

"For me, it started the moment I saw her," he says. "It was our first day of school, she was wearing a red dress, and had her hair in two braids instead of just one. A teacher asked her to sing in assembly, and the moment I heard her voice... I just knew. She was it for me."

The group of peacekeepers smile at each other and Peeta tightens his hold on her waist. Customers throughout the bakery sigh.

Her knees weaken. Its perfect. They're all convinced. No one will ever know its not real. His arm is the only thing keeping her upright as their audience peppers them questions. Whether this is Thread's doing or because they are actually curious doesn't matter. Their answers would get back to him, one way or another.

They must be nothing but stupid with love.

But something in what Peeta had said strikes her as odd. That red dress he spoke about... she remembers it. And the song she had sung- it had been the valley song. She still knew all the words. She looks up at his face as he answers another question. You would never have known that the boy standing next to her had been nearly dead on his feet just three months ago. He's beautiful now- alive, whole, and for the moment, _safe_.

And then it strikes her that part of what she had said had been true too. Shock shudders through her like she's jumped head first into a freezing lake.

_I didn't know what it would do to me, if he had died._

She had thought that. That was true. After the fire, when she was all but sure Peeta was gone, she had thought those words.

The room spins around and around. She tucks her head against his chest and wonders when the line between real and not real became this blurred.

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_**A/N: Oh my god I'm so tired. This chapter was a doozy, huh? Huge thanks to my tireless, wonderful beta Opaque! She's did a fantastic job with this chapter! **_

**_And to everyone who reviewed last chapter, and everyone here just to hang out, thanks so much for reading!_**

**_See you next week!_**


	10. Spirit

Trigger Warning: implied violence, gore, recreational alcohol consumption, death of a major character.

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_**x.**_

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It happens in early January. Greasy Sae is dead.

The words sit like curdled milk on her tongue, sour and heavy, and she needs to repeat them just to understand what they mean. Its seems impossible that Sae could have succumbed to anything other than a sonorous nap after a good helping of white liquor, and she finds herself drifting back to the Hob in numb shock.

There's nothing there now to suggest that it had once been a bustling market. She's been busy, hasn't been by in while, so she hasn't noticed until now that the rickety wooden structures that once made the booths and counters of the market have been smashed to jagged pieces and left out to alternate between freeze and rot.

Undoubtedly it had been left this way as a reminder.

_Theres nothing you do that we can't see. Theres nothing so precious we won't take it from you._

They don't need to remind her. She knows.

Katniss wanders back. The funeral is today, and she's not dressed for it yet. Something about finally donning the clothes for Sae's funeral makes her death seem all the more permanent, as though the ritual of dressing was a decision to accept the unacceptable.

Prim is frustrated when she gets home, sitting at the kitchen table with breakfast already set out.

"You said you'd only be gone for a minute. I thought you were going into the backyard or something."

"Sorry duck."

Prim huffs and kicks Katniss' chair out with her foot.

"Sit down and eat. You're going to have to drink your tea cold now."

"I'll just heat up more water.

"Katniss," Prim whines, stretching out her name in a nasal tone. "I used orange peel in it. Don't waste it, we only have a little bit of peel left."

"Ok ," she says, flopping down in the chair, "But Prim, don't use the peel for tea next time. I don't need it and we probably won't see more oranges for a few months yet."

Prim fiddles with the crusts of her toast on her plate, piling cheese on them with a frown. Prim hates crust.

"I just wanted a nice breakfast with you. You're always so busy."

There's a sharp ache in her chest that makes swallowing the mouthful of toast she just bit off a little more difficult than she expects. She coughs and drinks down half of her tea.

"Its better cold. I can taste more of the orange."

Prim rolls her eyes, but can't hide her smile as she pops another piece of what's arguably more cheese than bread in her mouth and chews. Holding a self conscious hand over her mouth, she chastises Katniss through her food.

"Youre lying, but that's OK, because _I_ know I make the best tea blends, even if you're too busy with your fake fiance to appreciate it."

"Prim!" she hisses, and slaps the table with her palm.

Prim stands up to clear the table mid-eyeroll.

"Calm down. It's just us here."

Telling Prim that the engagement was fake had been such a bad idea, but she had been beside herself when she heard, afraid Katniss would leave her. Where Prim had gotten the idea that she would ever do something like is beyond her... That is, until, she remembers her mother had abandoned Prim over and over and worse still, during a disaster that had almost claimed Katniss' life as well.

The worst part was she hadn't heard from Katniss herself. It had been Gale who told her when she was visiting the Hawthorne's. When no one contradicted what Gale said, Prim was devastated, assuming the worst of why Katniss hadn't told her, and wondering what would happen to her now that she would be all on her own.

When Katniss came home to find a sobbing Prim, she did the only thing she could think to do, which of course was revealing that the engagement was fake. That also meant she had to repeat the story of why it was necessary in the first place- skipping over certain details. Like the true nature of the tesserae.

Prim hadn't shut up about it since.

"Just stop talking about it," she snaps.

Elbow deep in breakfast dishes, Prim sighs.

"I will when you will."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Katniss you talk about him constantly."

"He's my boss. We work together. We spend a lot of time-"

"No one, and I mean no one, can ever be your boss in any sense of that word. I bet you've railroaded your way into bossing him around by now."

"I-"

Dammit. Prim was right.

Peeta was useless when they had a line of customers. He was slow to finish even the simplest tasks, and preferred to talk to each customer rather than get them in and out of the shop as quickly as possible. It was incredibly irritating. So yes, there'd been more than one occasion when she's snapped at him.

Prim smirks at her over her shoulder.

"Thought so."

Theres no way she'll win this one.

"I need to get dressed."

Katniss stomps out of the kitchen and rummages through her mother's drawers until she finds an appropriate black dress, tugging it over her head. Prim wanders back too and watches her as her hands flit through the motions of rebraiding her hair.

"Where are you off to?," she asks.

"Funeral."

"Oh my god," breathes Prim, "Who died? How come you never said anything about someone dying?"

"She was someone I knew from the Hob."

Katniss skirts around answering the trickier parts of Prim's questions, but feels all the worse for it. Sae deserved to be remembered for something more than just what she did to survive. They all did.

"She was-"

But she can't find words that are good enough to explain why or how Sae was important outside of being the perpetually the most senior member of Twelve. How could she explain to Prim that Sae had been one of the only constants in her life, year after year?

Katniss wonders how she would be remembered when she died. The surly wife of a baker who sold liquor from the backdoor?

A chill washes over her as she ties off her braid.

"I'll be back this afternoon," she says, and sets off for Sae's shack on the southern edge of the Seam.

Along the way, she stops to buy a single lump of coal. Its a tradition in Twelve to bring coal to a funeral. There are no graves yards in Twelve, besides the few very ancient ones from long before Panem, and recently even those are disappearing as the Capitol cleared even more land. Bodies in Twelve were burned nearly as soon as they hit the dirt. Funerals were usually held in the family's home, but only Merchant families could afford to have flowers and food.

Most Seam families were too poor to take time off from work, even if it was their family member who had died. That didn't mean that deaths went unmourned- the family of the deceased just swung their front door open and let their neighbors stop by to pay their respects as they could. At some point, it became tradition to bring a lump of coal to a funeral. The coal brought to the family was meant to provide for the family where the deceased no longer could, and to stand in place of the grave the deceased would never have.

At least until it was burned in winter.

Katniss knows she's stalling when she starts to get picky about the size of the lump of coal as she digs through the pile at the distribution center. A cramped house of teary-eyed mourners awaits her and with every passing moment she dreads it more.

Nonetheless, that's where she finds herself not even twenty minutes later, surrounded by quiet sniffles and the musky scent of wet wool and stale sweat. Her lump of coal joins a mound of others on the kitchen table, and she means to duck out as soon as she can make it through the crush of people packed into the tiny house, but Ripper, who's standing on the gently lopsided porch, grabs her before she can get away.

"Never thought I'd see the day. It's a damn shame," she croaks around her pipe, smoke seeping from between her clenched teeth.

Suddenly unable to trust her voice not to crack, Katniss nods in response and crosses her arms over her chest. Ripper's pipe clatters from one side of her mouth to the other as she leans her back against the house and sighs. In a bathrobe and a man's patched trenchcoat, with her face swollen and red, the normally unflappable woman seems much more vulnerable.

"She was a fan of yours, you know," she continues, watching the constant stream of mourners enter and exit the house, "I think you got your reputation from that woman alone."

What was Ripper talking about? What reputation?

She must look confused, because Ripper shakes her head.

"You got a lot of spirit, girl. Sae liked that."

Her beaten up boots and greying, patched tights swim in her vision as she trains her eyes downward. _Sae thought she had spirit. _What did that even mean?

Whatever it meant, it couldn't be entirely bad. It implied that Sae had thought she was a fighter, which meant other people did too. It was strange to think that was how people saw her, when all she was able to see in herself was desperation. A desperation to live. A desperation that Prim live too. Could she really be that much of a fighter if all she was willing to fight for were the lives of a very few people?

By that logic, Peeta had at least ten times the spirit she had, even if he wouldn't fight to save himself.

In a quiet sort of way, he did, she decides. There is an intensity in him she sees only fleetingly, when he frosts a cake, or works on a page in one of his many handmade sketchbooks. She has never seen the inside of these books, but there isn't a moment when Peeta thinks he is alone that he doesn't have his nose buried in one. She is both curious and terrified of what she will find should she ever have the chance to see what was inside of them.

Ripper claps a sudden hand down on her shoulder, startling her.

"This is no place for young people. Get out of here. Go on and cause some trouble somewhere."

There is nothing she wants to do less than cause trouble. A long walk is what she needs, maybe a cup of tea.

"Oh shoot. Almost forgot. She left something for you…" Ripper digs around her coat pocket and withdraws and piece of paper folded into a square. On the front, in crude, shaking handwriting, is her name.

Tonight is not the night to read letters from the dead. She tucks it into her coat pocket.

"Go on now. Git," Ripper says, shooing her away with her hands. "And don't you do nothing but fix yourself something stiff to drink and go find that boy of yours. He'll know what to do with you."

Sick with sudden fury, Katniss storms off the porch to Ripper's raucous laughter, which follows her until she turns off Sae's street. How Peeta can stand that woman is a total mystery. Katniss is sure she's never hated anyone more.

Without meaning to, her feet lead her to the back door of the bakery. As much as she wants to walk to clear her head, its cold and her need to be somewhere warm and familiar overrides everything else. Realizing suddenly that she followed Ripper's advice to find Peeta, she grinds her teeth and is about to stalk away when the back door swings open. Just her luck.

"Hey," Peeta says in surprise, running a hand through his sweaty curls. "What are you doing here?"

It infuriates her further to find that Ripper had been right about finding Peeta. It was exactly the right thing to do.

"I was on a walk and ended up here."

"Are you ok?"

"Little cold."

He moves to usher her inside, but she catches a glimpse of Delly and Thistle in the kitchen with a few tiny pots of multi-colored dyes spread out on the table.

"Never mind. I should go."

"Wait, Katniss- are you sure you're ok?"

"I'm fine."

"Should I… Do you want me to come by later?"

"Yes," she blurts before she can stop herself. And then, because the thought of being alone is unbearable, adds, "Don't keep me waiting."

She spins on her heel and strides away quickly, not looking back.

When she gets home, Prim is gone. There is a note on the table explaining that she is with Rory, and will be home soon. Silent and empty, her house feels as though it is shrinking all around her. Too small. Too stuffy. Too dark. She swings open the back door, where the still, which Peeta has painted into the shadows, sits dormant and cold. Arms wrapped around herself, she steps into the frigid afternoon air on her back porch.

This is no place to live an entire life, she decides. In the same house. The same District. Never knowing anything but this. Greasy Sae had spent her whole life here. She had never known anything else. Would she live her life like that? She longs for the woods for just a moment, but the woods mean Gale, and she is not ready to touch that. Not now.

The woods obviously can no longer be her sanctuary.

Its all too much. She can't breathe. She needs air. Needs to be anywhere but here. She needs to be _up._

The roof. It is colder up here, but the view of the roofs of the other houses in the Seam, rising up to break the skyline, fill her with a sense of ease. Here there is space to breathe. On her way to the roof, she had snagged a bottle of her own rotgut, which she had yet to try. Ripper had already been right once today, who said lightning couldn't strike twice?

The woman was hateful, but she had seen her fair share of death. Maybe her comment had been less off-handed than she had thought.

Unscrewing the lid on the mason jar, she downs her first gulp with a heaving gag. The liquid snakes a fiery trail down her mouth and throat, before burning in her stomach. _She likes it._

The wait for Peeta takes longer than she thought it would, but eventually he turns down her street, looking rushed and worried.

She stays silent. Watches him as he approaches her house. Clean, pale and wide-eyed, its obvious even from a distance that he isn't Seam. Merchants normally don't venture to the other side of Twelve, and if they do, it was only during the day. Peeta's anxious countenance and observant gaze would be dead giveaways, even if his pale skin and hair weren't.

They had a saying for that: "Open eyes catch flies."

Tonight, thinking that while watching him is unbearable.

That secret world inside of him, the one she can only catch passing glimpses of- was that one more real to him than this one? What did he see, when he looked around this place? She saw hungry children. She saw the Reaping. She saw missing fathers and dead mothers.

As he goes to mount the stairs to get to her front door she stops him by swinging her legs. The movement catches his eye, and he finally looks up.

"Hey," he says, looking up and squinting. "What are you doing all the way up there?"

She shrugs.

"What are you doing all the way down there?"

He smiles slightly.

"_Haha_. Funny. OK, really. Come down."

Her grin broadens.

"Why don't you come up?"

He tries to, but he's just not as nimble as she is. It takes him a few minutes to hoist himself up the tree, and then another few to shimmy his way across the branch. Everytime she thinks he's going to give up and beg her to come down instead, he surprises her by gritting his teeth and doubling his effort.

When he finally plops down next to her he glares.

"OK. What are we doing?"

"Causing trouble."

He drops his head into his hands. When he looks up she's drinking from the wide mouth of a mason jar.

"Jesus Christ, Katniss! There's ice everywhere up here! You're going to fall off!"

She raises both her eyebrows pointedly.

"Nope. No. Were getting down. Now. Good job, you have had what I am sure is _the_ worst idea of all time."

He goes to stand and she grabs his sleeve and yanks him back down.

"I'll be fine," she mutter, "I'm not going to fall off."

"You don't know that. This isn't safe."

"Its fine. Sit down."

He groans in frustration and sits down next to her.

"If you fall, I'm not going to be the one to tell Prim the reason why her sister is a pancake."

In response, she offers a him a drink from the jar, which he turns down immediately.

"At least one of us to be sober," he grumbles as she takes another long drink from the jar. "Want to tell me the real reason you're up here?"

She pauses, squinting out across the jagged roofline of the Seam.

"See that house out there?," she says, pointing toward one that rose above all the rest. "That's Ripper's house."

He follows her finger along the jumble of houses until he spies it- the only two story house in the Seam.

She then points just slightly to the left of that house.

"And that," she says, "is where I was today."

She silent for a moment before she continues.

"I went to a funeral."

"A funeral for who?"

"A woman named Greasy Sae. You would have liked her, I think."

"Who was she?"

_Good question. _

"A vendor at the Hob. The oldest living person in Twelve. And apparently, a fan of mine."

"Its hard not to be. A fan of yours, I mean."

She snorts and takes another long drink from the jar. The spirit burns in her nose and throat as it slides down, then spreads a cozy heat through her limbs.

"Tell me our story," she says.

"What story?"

"How we met. The first time we kissed. How you asked me to marry you."

Peeta is quiet for a minute, fixing an oddly thoughtful stare at his shoes.

"Why don't you tell me, Katniss? How would it have happened?"

"I'm no good at this. But you are, and-" she clears her throat, which has suddenly gone dry. "-and we really should iron out these details."

Shes sleepy and warm, and suddenly wants nothing more than to close her eyes. Lying back against the roof, her gaze drifts across the darkening sky. In all of those books of his, had he ever imagined this? Had he ever tried to keep track of their lies? There had been so many- it was dizzying to try to keep up with them all.

So what were a few more? She wants to know- she has to know- what story had he imagined?

"It started at school. I'd watch you sometimes. I was curious. Maybe- maybe it was a little bit of a crush."

Her arms raise over her head and she tucks her face against the one closest to him.

"And then, the fire. We both lost so much, and I couldn't even dream of getting to see you again, much less talk to you. And I really did want to, but I was terrified at the same time. I had built you up so much that you just became utterly unreachable. I gave up and settled for just watching you, because I still had to know you."

The cocoon of warmth between her face and the smooth leather of her jacket becomes her world. This warmth, Peeta's words, and the sky, big and open and just out of reach. If only there was a way climb there. If only there was a way out of the fences that surrounded Twelve that wouldn't lead to death or torture. Perhaps Peeta had found the only way, inside of himself.

"And just when I had given up entirely on ever seeing you again, you showed up at the bakery just as I was closing up. I stayed open for you, so you could buy bread, and I was dying to say something, anything to keep you there…"

Its all there in her mind, just as he describes. It was more than maybe. It really could have been this way. There is a leaden lump in her throat that makes it hard to swallow.

"I told you how I felt that night, even though I was scared. And I told you not to worry. That I would take care of you, if you allowed it."

"And what did I do?" she croaks. "What did I say?"

Peeta lies down next to her, and when she sneaks a look at him over her jacket, those blue eyes are trained on her, only her. This world he's built, where she buys bread instead of stealing it, where she is unreachable but desired- she could disappear into it.

"I don't know, Katniss. What did you say?"

Closing her eyes again, she lives that night the way Peeta describes. She sees herself in the bakery as he confesses, and immediately she knows what she does next. But saying it would ruin the world that Peeta has so carefully crafted. This is a world where he loves her, so could it be a world where she could let herself love him?

No, she decides. In no world real or imagined could she ever see herself as capable of that.

"I say: _I don't need anyone to survive._"

Peeta laughs.

"And that's how it starts," he says.

"_That's_ how?" she asks incredulously.

"Yes. A story's never any good without conflict."

"So you... what? You convince me that I need you?"

"No," he laughs. "I convince you that we need each other."

Peeta words jumble together until its not his voice she's hearing, just the story he paints. There are walks together through the snow. They play cards. He cooks for her. Their first kiss is at sunset, in the garden in the back of the bakery. There are fights. Gifts. Small things. _Real things._ Whether its the alcohol in her veins or the soft drone of his voice she can't be sure, but at some point she drifts off. The fantasy isn't over though. Her mind, or Peeta's words, keep supplying the images.

Nights during the winter where they watch the snow fall out of the window in the apartment on top of the bakery, talking about nothing for hours. He teaches her to bake, which she is predictably short-tempered with. She nurses him back to health after a nasty cold. There is no hunger here in Peeta's fictional winter, no Capitol posters, no tesserae and no peacekeepers. This world is real, but softer. Gentler.

She is bobbing gently in the dark waters between sleeping and not when she feels herself being lifted and carried. Her head lolls against something warm, and she burrows her face into it. There is movement around her. Panicked whispers. A long series of wooden creaks. Peeta's rushed voice rumbling against her- _Is this the ladder you brought him on? How is he? _

He carries her somewhere warm, and a crowd of voices is waiting for them. Peeta sits her down on the couch and someone screams, feet pound on the stairs, and the light prickles and bleeds into balls of long spines all around her.

Someone is asking where Gale is, and ordering that water be boiled and fresh rags be brought out.

Why are so many people here? Something is telling her that its late. They were breaking curfew. Risking arrest. Or worse.

Delly is screaming over and over that Peeta lied to her, that he _knew what was happening in the square_, and Prim is sobbing airlessly. _Something is wrong._ She stands up and the room spins violently. Why is Haymitch here? She takes a step forward and is overwhelmed by a heavy, cloying scent. Nausea washes through her.

"Oh for fuck's sake- Is she drunk?!" Haymitch snaps.

At first, it doesn't make sense. And then, she realizes. This is real. This is not a dream.

That smell. It's blood.

Peeta notices that she is standing and moves toward her.

"Katniss, wait. You shouldn't-"

She shrugs him off and walks further into the kitchen. Prim is the first person her eyes find. Her face is pale, her eyes wide and glassy, and she is shaking violently while she grips a dark-stained rag in a tight fist over her left eye.

"Prim!," she cries, and rushes forward. As she does, her eyes catch on a dark figure laid on his stomach on the kitchen table. She's not sure what she's looking at until she right in front of it. It's boy's back, only barely recognizable as such. It's mutilated, the skin torn open in long trails, oozing blood over his sides on onto the table below.

"Who?" she croaks dizzily.

"Rory," Prim sobs.

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**A/N: Huge thanks to my beta Opaque for another 24 hour turn around!**

**To my readers and reviewers, you guys are fantastic! See you next week!**


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